October | 2021 | Science Matters

Swiss Put Brakes on CO2 Emissions Policy

Posted on October 9, 2021 by Ron Clutz

Hans Rentsch writes at Real Clear Energy Farewell to climate policy illusions after the successful referendum against the revised CO2 law. H/T zerohedge Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

On June 13th, the revised CO2 law failed at the Swiss ballot box. Judging from the rather confused debate following the rejection of the bill, one can hardly say that the shock in the politically competent circles had a beneficial effect in favor of more realism. Many commentators were surprised that the electorate put the brakes on climate policy, and many seemed puzzled about how to interpret the will of the people as expressed in the vote. In the referendum of May 2017, the revised Energy Act had been approved by a clear majority, but four years later a tight “no” to the revised CO2 Law followed.

The crucial point sounds almost trivial: The electorate that approved the Energy Act in May 2017 was not the same electorate that voted against the CO2 Act four years later – even disregarding the demographic shifts. The main difference lies in the much higher voter turnout for the CO2 Act – almost 60 percent, versus just 43 percent for the Energy Act. . . This high mobilization, well above the average of 46 percent, was due to the four other proposals that were voted on the same day, above all the two popular initiatives aiming at a reorientation of the agricultural policy.

The urban-rural divide only depicts the different political positions: urban Switzerland ticks left, rural Switzerland non-left. Instead of superficially complaining about a divide between town and country, it is worth looking at other ditches. It goes without saying that the differences between left and right are particularly great when it comes to issues that are as ideologically and morally charged as energy and climate policies. Supporters of the Green Party voted in favor of the Energy Act with a yes share of 94 percent, while only 16 percent of SVP party supporters voted in favor. Almost the same gap appeared in the referendum on the CO2 law: 93 percent versus 17 percent.

An orientation based on certain morally rewarding values is widespread among the materially privileged educated elite. Such attitudes are often used for personal image cultivation, but such behavior is associated with costs. Just think of the high prices for “ethical consumption.” In an article in the leading Swiss daily newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the cultural scientist Wolfgang Ullrich wrote that to orient one’s life towards higher values is the bliss only of elites. Their privileged social position enables the “new moral nobility” to implement a value-conscious lifestyle and thus to rise above other people. The fact that the support for the Energy and the CO2 bills was so strong in the university educated and the cultural milieus can primarily be explained with this value orientation and not with a superior technical or economic insight into the effects of the new legislation. The prominent American moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt said in a speech, only slightly exaggerating, that highly educated people are not, as they themselves would think, better informed than others, they are just more adept at justifying their prejudices.

The rough categorization “highly educated” also blurs an important fact. In terms of numbers, the predominant university degrees stem from “soft” subjects generally referred to as humanities (typically with female over-representation) such as languages, psychology, journalism, media, law, political science, sociology, history, geography, ethnology and medical-social subjects. In contrast to the political-ideological spectrum of the entire electorate, there is a pronounced left-green “value bias” among university graduates in the above-mentioned fields of study. Such orientation towards self-defined values also reflects a tendency towards illusory social goals and a massive overestimation of political will and ability in the sense of: all we want is also feasible.

In times of rising alarmist voices, nothing would be more useful than to engage in a sober analysis of the situation without prejudice and to part from all the illusions that shape current energy and climate policy. This applies in particular to the Fukushima-fueled Swiss Energiewende.

The 1.5 degree target from the Paris 2015 conference and agreement and the connected grandiose “zero carbon” oaths are the great basic illusions.

Unattainable goals are bound to make climate policy a constant failure. Why should the world state of 1850 at the end of the Little Ice Age with a CO2 concentration of 280 ppm represent a natural climate optimum for the environment, health, and nutrition? Furthermore, since the average global temperature has already increased by 1.1 degrees since then, and since the temperature reacts with a delay to today’s CO2 concentration of 415 ppm, the 1.5 degrees would probably also be exceeded, even if the human world were to stand still tomorrow.

The approval of the Energy Act in 2017 was primarily a vote in favor of phasing out nuclear energy. In the VOTO follow-up survey, four out of five respondents expressed a wish for a nuclear-free Switzerland. The images of the reactor explosion in Fukushima were still firmly imprinted on people’s minds. “Hard cases make bad law” is an old political adage that pops up here. We could have learned a lot from the Fukushima hard or even worst case, if we had analyzed the consequences more calmly, instead of announcing an “energy transition” two months after the disaster with the phasing out of nuclear energy. Winston Churchill is credited with observing that security lies in the multitude of variables that are available as options for action. If, based on costless wishes and on vague hopes, a county’s voting population restricts options for action, it must also be prepared to deal with a reality that might behave differently than hoped for.

A counter-experience to Fukushima that could stir up people’s mindset in a similar way favoring a more realistic energy policy, would be an electricity blackout provoking the failure of important systems. Such an event is not unrealistic under the pressures and constraints of the announced energy transition. Relevant warnings can be found in official risk scenarios for Switzerland. With the ongoing and increasing uncoupling from the European electricity network due to Switzerland’s rejection of an institutionally binding general agreement with the EU, these risks are rising. But as long as the perception and the media communication of accidents in the energy sector – not least thanks to the specters “Fukushima” and “Chernobyl” – are so distorted at the expense of nuclear energy, the prevailing opinions in the population should not be overestimated.

Perhaps in a few years we shall see a climate youth on strike who – in contrast to today’s ideologically blind Fridays for Future activists – is calling for an exit from the “nuclear exit.” All to the benefit of ambitious climate targets.

Footnote: Schiller Institute reaction to results:

The big surprise with the No vote over the new Swiss CO2 law was the fact that the majority of young people voted against it. According to the website 20 Minuten website, 54% of those over 65 — that is to say the Boomers — voted in favor of the new law, while 58% of those under 34 voted against it, according to a 20 Minuten and Tamedia survey of 16,249 participants. See report here.

The leading Swiss weekly Weltwoche wrote that the result signaled a “turning point in international climate policy,” a “popular uprising” in which the Swiss electorate rebelled “against the dictates of the elites…. The Swiss are going on a climate strike, just differently than what those in power intended. They want less government action against climate change instead of more.”

The claim that was circulating, that many people voted against the new law because it was not “strong enough” also seems to have not been decisive, according to the survey, since only 2% of the no voters claimed they cast their ballot against it for that reason. According to the survey, fear of higher costs was the main argument against the CO2 law, including among young people.

Bogus Talk about Climate Tipping Points

Posted on October 9, 2021 by Ron Clutz

Tallbloke’s Talkshop helpfully posted on a new study Climate change tipping points may be too simple a concept, say researchers. This is welcome to hear, but as I will discuss below, the authors do not go nearly far enough to let the air out of this exaggerated rhetoric. The study itself is Evasion of tipping in complex systems through spatial pattern formation. The title already suggests a questionable paradigm, which is stated up front in the abstract:

In the Anthropocene, there is a need to better understand the catastrophic effects that climate and land-use change may have on ecosystems, Earth system components, and the whole Earth system. The concept of critical transitions, or tipping from one state to another, contributes to this understanding.

The above diagram from the study shows the tipping point paradigm accepted by the authors as a foundation for discovering how ecosystems are sometimes able to evade tipping over from a present state. It is heartening that the authors refer to the resilience of ecosystems and say that observed ecological disturbances are in fact evidence of natural stability, not fragility.

However, they are applying a theory of “tipping points” that pertains to sociology not natural science, while also assuming, of course, the environmental mythological Garden of Eden that would be eternal and unchanging except for human evil activity.

The whole paradigm is a corruption of hard physical science by soft sociological fuzzy thinking, a specialty of environmentalism.

Firstly, the popularity of the “tipping points” notion comes from pop sociology, and there are many good reasons not to bring it into earth sciences, unless the intent is to politicize the science. A reprinted post below provides this discussion.

Background from previous post Tipping Points Confuse Social and Earth Science

In the drive to push public opinion over the top regarding global warming/climate change, the media is increasingly filled with references to climate “tipping points.” For example, some months ago an IPCC spokesperson claimed a climate disaster is now happening each and every week. And the media abounds with reports to press home the point. Here are some of the current disasters caused by climate change, ripped (as they say) from the headlines.

Birds are shrinking as the climate warms

Climate change-related deaths and damage on the rise

Europe Could Face Annual Extreme Heat Waves Due to Climate Change

Food Prices Expected To Jump Next Year Due To Climate Change

Climate change taking serious toll on human health: WHO report

Climate Crisis Causing Hunger for Millions of Africans

How climate change is causing more premature births

Et cetera, et cetera. (A complete list would provide more than one disaster for every week of the year.)

IOW, as Pys.org reported, all this hype may make this year the tipping point: The year the world woke up to the climate emergency.

Background on the Use of “Tipping Points”

The context for understanding the rise of the “tipping point” notion is provided by a 2018 paper in Environmental Research Letters Defining tipping points for social-ecological systems scholarship—an interdisciplinary literature review. As the title suggests the researchers are not studying the earth, but rather people’s perceptions about the earth. This growing field of environmental psychology confirms how “climate change” muddles social and physical sciences. Excerpts in italics with my bolds

Abstract

The term tipping point has experienced explosive popularity across multiple disciplines over the last decade. Research on social-ecological systems (SES) has contributed to the growth and diversity of the term’s use. The diverse uses of the term obscure potential differences between tipping behavior in natural and social systems, and issues of causality across natural and social system components in SES. This paper aims to create the foundation for a discussion within the SES research community about the appropriate use of the term tipping point, especially the relatively novel term ‘social tipping point.’

We review existing literature on tipping points and similar concepts (e.g. regime shifts, critical transitions) across all spheres of science published between 1960 and 2016 with a special focus on a recent and still small body of work on social tipping points. We combine quantitative and qualitative analyses in a bibliometric approach, rooted in an expert elicitation process.

Historical Analysis and Concerns

We find that the term tipping point became popular after the year 2000—long after the terms regime shift and critical transition—across all spheres of science. We identify 23 distinct features of tipping point definitions and their prevalence across disciplines, but find no clear taxonomy of discipline-specific definitions. Building on the most frequently used features, we propose definitions for tipping points in general and social tipping points in SES in particular.

Being located at the intersection between the social and natural sciences, SES researchers need to tread carefully when borrowing concepts from other disciplines. Such a move often involves the crossing of ontological boundaries, where the metaphorical use of a concept can mask important differences between two objects of study. The two phenomena included in the analogy should be similar in the sense that they can be characterized by common laws or principles. The success of the analogy depends on whether attributes of tipping points in the target domain can be tested and assessed similar to the one in the source domain (Daniel 1955, Gentner 1983). However, SES research pays little attention to whether the presumed observation of tipping behavior in a social system is conceptually equal or (partly) different than tipping processes in an ecological system. It remains unknown whether tipping points in natural systems, such as a lake or the climate, display the same underlying mechanisms as tipping points in social systems, such as in financial markets or political institutions.

The tipping point concept traces its origins back to scientific papers in chemistry (Hoadley 1884) and mathematics (Poincare´ 1885), which refer to a qualitative change in a system described mathematically as a bifurcation. Bifurcation theory is still used today in mathematics, physics, complex systems science, and related fields.

In the social sciences, tipping points originated much later to address neighborhood dynamics of racial segregation in political science (Grodzins 1957), sociology/urban planning (Wolf 1963), and economics (Schelling 1978). Social scientists began to develop similar concepts of social change without the tipping point language. For example, sociologist Mark Granovetter (1978) uses the term threshold to understand the differences in individuals’ decisions to engage in a collective behavior, such as rioting.

Whether or not it can be attributed to Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point (2000), starting around 2005, the term was widely adopted among climate scientists (Russill and Nyssa 2009, Kopp et al 2016) to describe rapid, non-linear change in parts of the climate system. Previously this phenomenon had been referred to with different terminology, such as critical points, but now climate scientists embraced tipping point language, with three papers using tipping point terminology to focus on ice sheet dynamics in the Arctic (Holland et al 2006, Lindsay and Zhang 2005, Winton 2006). A 2008 paper introduced the idea of tipping elements in the climate system, defined as subsystems of the climate system that can experience abrupt change,‘triggering a transition to a new state.’

The historical account of the movement of the concept from its origins in mathematics and chemistry to the social sciences, popular discourse and back to mathematical modeling in the climate sciences raises important scientific questions.

The increasingly frequent use of the concept of tipping points in both the natural and social sciences could be scientifically questionable: sociological and political tipping points might be very different phenomena than climatic tipping points, even if both natural and social systems may be subject to rapid qualitative change. If institutional tipping and ecosystem tipping are different ‘things in nature’— different ontological entities—scientific language should not treat them as the same. Scientific language should clarify rather than veil potential differences between tipping points in different fields.

Phenomena in nature—the objects of tipping point research Different fields of science deploy tipping point terminology to study vastly different real-world phenomena. In the natural sciences (Ecology, Climate and Earth System Science), scholars are primarily interested in the tipping of ecological systems, e.g. the eutrophication of lakes, and of larger Earth System components, also called climate tipping elements (e.g. Arctic ice sheets). This research crosses multiple scales of interest, but focuses on a shared mechanism of change: positive, self-reinforcing feedbacks moving a system into a different stability domain. Key research challenges include the limited reversibility of a system to its previous state and significant predictive challenges related to tipping points.

Conclusions

To conclude, we have proposed a unifying definition for tipping points, building on the most frequent themes identified in our analysis: a tipping point is a threshold at which small quantitative changes in the system trigger a non-linear change process that is driven by system-internal feedback mechanisms and inevitably leads to a qualitatively different state of the system, which is often irreversible. This definition establishes a minimum set of four constitutive features of tipping points that apply across disciplines:

- multiple stable states;
- non-linear change;
- feedbacks as driving mechanism;
- limited reversibility.

If these four essential characteristics are given, the use of the term tipping point is justified. However, whether it is possible to apply these tools to social and social-ecological change phenomena remains unclear and is a subject that requires future research.

Our research found that the tipping point concept is applied to a vast array of change processes, ranging from ice sheet dynamics to societal transformations, which might mask ontological differences between these diverse phenomena. Concerned about the pattern of terminological replacement—the use of tipping point language instead of previously existing terms—and its potential effects on the quality of science, we encourage researchers to critically assess their terminological choices and avoid ‘conceptual amnesia’.

My Comment

Besides the issue of confusing natural and social processes, the paper only touched tangentially on three related problems applying this terminology to global warming/climate change. Firstly, in the natural world there are shifts between multiple stable states, in some cases reversing back and forth in cyclical patterns. For example, paleoclimatologists have mapped the earth’s oscillations between “hot house” and “ice house.”

Secondly, headlines like those above always portray change as negative and destructive. In both natural and social tipping points there can be desirable, transformative shifts, not just adverse, gloomy results.
Thirdly, as Brothers Judd warn, there is less than meets the eye in claims of tipping points. From their review of Gladwell’s book:

As a general matter Gladwell’s Tipping Point idea, like Darwin’s idea of Evolution, is grounded more in literary metaphor than in science. If you ask, as Gladwell does, why Hush Puppies suddenly became fashionable again after years of declining or stagnant sales, the answer must be that they hit a Tipping Point. If you ask why they stayed unpopular for so long, the answer must be there were no Tipping Points during that time. Why did the book Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood become a best seller, while Rebecca Wells’s previous books hadn’t, or other (better) novels didn’t ? One hit a Tipping Point, the others didn’t. But this doesn’t really add anything to our understanding of the human behavior and desires that fueled the crazes nor does it help us to determine how to tip other products and processes in the future. Gladwell’s argument, like all pseudoscience, is a closed loop–if something tips then it hit a Tipping Point; if it doesn’t, then it didn’t. Rather than explaining what happened, the metaphor, once accepted, stifles intelligent analysis. The fact that something happened comes to seem a sufficient explanation and a justification for saying that the process occurred; the actual elements of this theoretical process need never be demonstrated, nor tested; it’s as if the circular beauty of the metaphor precludes questioning its validity.

Daniel B. Botkin is Professor Emeritus, University of California, Santa Barbara, in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology.

Secondly, the notion of a static climate system, absent human impacts, is backward thinking, superseded by Dynamic Ecology, a more contemporary and realistic understanding.

For a more realistic view of nature and biological processes see writings by Daniel Botkin, who led the shift in paradigm to Dynamic Ecology, especially in his influential book: Discordant Harmonies: a New Ecology for the Twenty-first Century. 1990 Oxford University Press, New York. In 2014 he shared his view of the climate change issue in Testimony to the House Subcommittee on Science,Space and Technology. The whole document is enlightening, and included point-by-point critique of IPCC statements. Transcript is: Testimony to the House Subcommittee on Science,Space and Technology.

His main points are highlighted below, while details and examples are in the full text.

1.I want to state up front that we have been living through a warming trend driven by a variety of influences. However, it is my view that this is not unusual, and contrary to the characterizations by the IPCC and the National Climate Assessment, these environmental changes are not apocalyptic nor irreversible.

2.My biggest concern is that both the reports present a number of speculative, and sometimes incomplete, conclusions embedded in language that gives them more scientific heft than they deserve. The reports are “scientific-sounding” rather than based on clearly settled facts or admitting their lack. Established facts about the global environment exist less often in science than laymen usually think.

3.HAS IT BEEN WARMING? Yes, we have been living through a warming trend, no doubt about that. The rate of change we are experiencing is also not unprecedented, and the “mystery” of the warming “plateau” simply indicates the inherent complexity of our global biosphere. Change is normal, life on Earth is inherently risky; it always has been. The two reports, however, makes it seem that environmental change is apocalyptic and irreversible. It is not.

4.IS CLIMATE CHANGE VERY UNUSUAL? No, it has always undergone changes.

5.ARE GREENHOUSE GASES INCREASING? Yes, CO2 rapidly.

6.IS THERE GOOD SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH ON CLIMATE CHANGE? Yes, a great deal of it.

7.ARE THERE GOOD SCIENTISTS INVOLVED IN THE IPCC 2014 REPORT? Yes, the lead author of the Terrestrial (land) Ecosystem Report is Richard Betts, a coauthor of one my scientific papers about forecasting effects of global warming on biodiversity.

8. ARE THERE SCIENTIFICALLY ACCURATE STATEMENTS AT PLACES IN THE REPORT? Yes, there are.

9. What I sought to learn was the overall take-away that the reports leave with a reader. I regret to say that I was left with the impression that the reports overestimate the danger from human-induced climate change and do not contribute to our ability to solve major environmental problems. I am afraid that an “agenda” permeates the reports, an implication that humans and our activity are necessarily bad and ought to be curtailed.

10. ARE THERE MAJOR PROBLEMS WITH THE REPORTS? Yes, in assumptions, use of data, and conclusions.

11. My biggest concern about the reports is that they present a number of speculative, and sometimes incomplete, conclusions embedded in language that gives them more scientific heft than they deserve. The reports, in other words, are “scientific-sounding,” rather than clearly settled and based on indisputable facts. Established facts about the global environment exist less often in science than laymen usually think.

12. The two reports assume and/or argue that the climate warming forecast by the global climate models is happening and will continue to happen and grow worse. Currently these predictions are way off the reality (Figure 1). Models, like all scientific theory, have to be tested against real-world observations. Experts in model validation say that the climate models frequently cited in the IPCC report are little if any validated. This means that as theory they are fundamentally scientifically unproven.

13. The reports suffer from using the term “climate change” with two meanings: natural and human-induced. These are both given as definitions in the IPCC report and are not distinguished in the text and therefore confuse a reader. (The Climate Change Assessment uses the term throughout including its title, but never defines it.) There are places in the reports where only the second meaning—human induced—makes sense, so that meaning has to be assumed. There are other places where either meaning could be applied.

14. Some of the report conclusions are the opposite of those given in articles cited in defense of those conclusions.

15. Some conclusions contradict and are ignorant of the best statistically valid observations.

16. The report for policy makers on Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability repeats the assertion of previous IPCC reports that “large fraction of species” face “increase extinction risks” (p15). Overwhelming evidence contradicts this assertion. And it has been clearly shown that models used to make these forecasts, such as climate envelope models and species-area curve models, make incorrect assumptions that lead to erroneous conclusions, over-estimating extinction risks. Surprisingly few species became extinct during the past 2.5 million years, a period encompassing several ice ages and warm periods.

17. THE REPORT GIVES THE IMPRESSION THAT LIVING THINGS ARE FRAGILE AND RIGID, unable to deal with change. The opposite is to case. Life is persistent, adaptable, adjustable.

18. STEADY-STATE ASSUMPTION: There is an overall assumption in the IPCC 2014 report and the Climate Change Assessment that all change is negative and undesirable; that it is ecologically and evolutionarily unnatural, bad for populations, species, ecosystems, for all life on planet Earth, including people. This is the opposite of the reality.

19. The summary for policy makers on Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability makes repeated use of the term “irreversible” changes. A species going extinct is irreversible, but little else about the environment is irreversible.

20. The extreme overemphasis on human-induced global warming has taken our attention away from many environmental issues that used to be front and center but have been pretty much ignored in the 21st century.

21. Do the problems with these reports mean that we can or should abandon any concerns about global warming or abandon any research about it? Certainly not, but we need to put this issue within an appropriate priority with other major here-and-now environmental issues that are having immediate effects.

22. The concerns I have mentioned with the IPCC apply as well to the White House’s National Climate Assessment.

Summary

Finally, as the critique shows, tipping points are like climate change itself: Applying labels to something that has already happened, with no predictive utility.

Update: What is an “Invalid Vote” Anyway?

Posted on October 8, 2021 by Ron Clutz

As explained in a reprinted post below:

A vote is an indication of preference cast by an eligible, registered voter. It must be cast in the time, place, and manner prescribed by law.

Thus a ballot cast claiming to be a vote is not in fact one to be counted if any of the conditions are not met. The image above presents the many ways supposed “votes” failed to be valid votes in Maricopa County, Arizona, in the 2020 federal election. The total count of ballots cast was 2,089,563 and Biden won by 10,800. Each of the many circles depict the % of total votes that failed to meet a particular criterion. If the top row circles are summarized, the total number of invalid votes in that county exceeded 700,000. Jovan Pulitzer explains why he made the chart:

I think people need to visually see all the errors, all the information that shows, hey, Maricopa at its worst literally should be decertified, at its best could easily be redone…

…I just charted out a very simple way to understand how bad is the bad. If they’re just pie charts, if you think here in this election was won on .049047%, right? It’s such a small margin that it could have swung any way…

…There are eight charts across the top, those are just the low hanging fruit that show this election has serious issues because any one of these would demand that it can’t be certified or it needs to be rerun.

Background at previous post What is a Vote Anyway?

Ted Noel writes at Town Hall In the Arizona Audit, Words Matter. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

This is one of those times when we wish that people would have used more circumspect language. Both the Arizona auditors and John Solomon committed a cardinal error that has allowed the Left to celebrate victory and ignore the fine print. Both note that Biden got more “votes” than Trump. That conclusion is incorrect, because it ignores the rest of the story.

A vote is an indication of preference cast by an eligible, registered voter.

It must be cast in the time, place, and manner prescribed by law. Anything else is not a vote. In Arizona, it is cast on paper ballots and read by machines. All the “accurate count” showed was that the machines counted the pieces of paper accurately. That’s all machines do. They do not count “ballots.”

The canvass did not answer the primary question, “How many of the pieces of paper were lawful ballots and how many should have been excluded because they were not lawful votes?” All the “accurate count” proves is that there was no outside effort to tweak the numbers by changing them by some direct internet chicanery. But it does not prove that Biden won. Or not. And that is the problem. I won’t repeat all the details the auditors droned on through, but there are several key findings.

Over 50,000 “ballots” were unlawfully cast.

There were dead people, new addresses without re-registration, double votes, envelopes with no signatures, ballots received that were never sent out, and so on. Every one of those “ballots” were unlawful. They should have been rejected to remove them from the canvass. Since the margin between Trump and Biden was around ten thousand, this is far more than enough to cast doubt on the outcome. And then comes the drama.Maricopa County did everything it could to block the audit. If it was confident that it had done its job correctly, then one would expect that it would cooperate fully. Indeed, with the hand count matching the canvas, it seems that all should be well. But then we find that hundreds of thousands of election files were deleted from Maricopa County’s computer servers the day before the audit began. That smacks of guilty knowledge.

We also know that the servers allowed election data to be seen from the internet. Security was extremely lax, and even though it appears no votes were changed, other issues arise. Legally required signature matching on absentee ballots basically evaporated as the original tally went on.

Was someone watching from outside, then advising local officials on how to let unlawful ballots through to obtain the desired result?

At a bare minimum, the Arizona Presidential election was irretrievably tainted. The taint was large enough to make determination of the actual winner impossible. That’s why I wrote before January 6 that VP Pence should send several slates of electors back to their respective state legislatures for a final determination.

Those states, by repeated violations of their own state laws, did not hold elections. The processes they followed did not allow a tally of lawful votes.

The Arizona legislature should vote to decertify the electors for the 2020 election. This may have no legal effect, but if it leads two or three other states to the same conclusion, we may have a Constitutional crisis, and there are no guideposts for this trail. The Constitution simply did not foresee the compounding of raw power applied to prevent the proper administration of a Presidential election. The Supreme Court may deny cert based on the passage of time beyond the designated Electoral College date. Or it could decide to hear the case and ultimately find that Biden’s election is a nullity ab initio. Or something in between. Who knows?

What we do know is that we simply cannot declare who won the Arizona election with any degree of certainty. Even if that changes nothing else, it should give us a resolve to fix our elections so that they cannot be manipulated outside the law.

Pieces of paper with marks on them are not ballots until it is determined that those marks were made by a lawful voter in the time and manner prescribed by the legislature. Only after that bar is crossed for every ballot is it possible to have an election. Biden did not win the Arizona election because there was no Arizona election. It is impossible to truthfully say that he got more “votes” than Donald Trump. Nobody actually knows.

Vaccine Cult Strikes Again: No Pills Allowed

Posted on October 8, 2021 by Ron Clutz

Matt Taibbi reports at substack The Cult of the Vaccine NeuroticExcerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Yesterday, I ran a story that had nothing to do with vaccines, about the seeming delay of the development of a drug called molnupiravir (see the above segment with the gracious hosts of The Hill: Rising for more). In the time it took to report and write that piece, conventional wisdom turned against the drug, which is now suspected of ivermectinism and other deviationist, anti-vax tendencies, in the latest iteration of our most recent collective national mania — the Cult of the Vaccine.

The speed of the change was incredible. Just a week ago, on October 1st, the pharmaceutical giant Merck issued a terse announcement that quickly became big news. Molnupiravir, an experimental antiviral drug, “reduced the risk of hospitalization or death” of Covid-19 patients by as much as 50%, according to a study.

[For Background see Why Merck Dissed Its Own Invention Ivermectin]

The stories that rushed out in the ensuing minutes and hours were almost uniformly positive. AP called the news a “potentially major advance in efforts to fight the pandemic,” while National Geographic quoted a Yale specialist saying, “Having a pill that would be easy for people to take at home would be terrific.”

This is what news looks like before propagandists get their hands on it. Time writer Alice Park’s lede was sensible and clear. If molnupiravir works — a big if, incidentally — it’s good news for everyone, since not everyone is immunized, and the vaccines aren’t 100% effective anyway. As even Vox put it initially, molnupiravir could “help compensate for persistent gaps in Covid-19 vaccination coverage.”

Within a day, though, the tone of coverage turned. Writers began stressing a Yeah, but approach, as in, “Any new treatment is of course good, but get your fucking shot.” A CNN lede read, “A pill that could potentially treat Covid-19 is a ‘game-changer,’ but experts are emphasizing that it’s not an alternative to vaccinations.” The New York Times went with, “Health officials said the drug could provide an effective way to treat Covid-19, but stressed that vaccines remained the best tool.”

If you’re thinking it was only a matter of time before the mere fact of molnupiravir’s existence would be pitched in headlines as actual bad news, you’re not wrong: Marketwatch came out with “‘It’s not a magic pill’: What Merck’s antiviral pill could mean for vaccine hesitancy” the same day Merck issued its release. The piece came out before we knew much of anything concrete about the drug’s effectiveness, let alone whether it was “magic.”

Bloomberg’s morose “No, the Merck pill won’t end the pandemic” was released on October 2nd, i.e. one whole day after the first encouraging news of a possible auxiliary treatment whose most ardent supporters never claimed would end the pandemic. This article said the pill might be cause to celebrate, but warned its emergence “shouldn’t be cause for complacency when it comes to the most effective tool to end this pandemic: vaccines.” Bloomberg randomly went on to remind readers that the unrelated drug ivermectin is a “horse de-worming agent,” before adding that if molnupiravir ends up “being viewed as a solution for those who refuse to vaccinate,” the “Covid virus will continue to persist.”

In other words, it took less than 24 hours for the drug — barely tested, let alone released yet — to be accused of prolonging the pandemic.

By the third day, mentions of molnupiravir in news reports nearly all came affixed to stern reminders of its place beneath vaccines in the medical hierarchy, as in the New York Times explaining that Dr. Anthony Fauci, who initially told reporters the new drug was “impressive,” now “warned that Americans should not wait to be vaccinated because they believe they can take the pill.”

[Comment: Pills are not second to vaccines in some medical hierarchy; they are equally essential and paramount for those who get sick, vaccinated or not.]

Since the start of the Trump years, we’ve been introduced to a new kind of news story, which assumes adults can’t handle multiple ideas at once, and has reporters frantically wrapping facts deemed dangerous, unorthodox, or even just insufficiently obvious in layers of disclaimers. The fear of uncontrolled audience brain-drift is now so great that even offhand references must come swaddled in these journalistic Surgeon General’s warnings, which is why whenever we read anything now, we almost always end up fighting through nests of phrases like “the debunked conspiracy theory that COVID-19 was created in a lab” in order to get to whatever the author’s main point might be.

As a student in the Soviet Union I noticed subscribers to what Russians called the sovok mindset talked in interminable strings of pogovorki, i.e goofball proverbs or aphorisms you’d heard a million times before (“He who takes no risk, drinks no champagne,” or “Work isn’t a wolf, it won’t run off into the woods,” etc). This was a learned defense mechanism, adopted by a people who’d found out the hard way that anyone caught not speaking nonstop nonsense could be suspected of harboring original thoughts. Voluble stupidity is a great disguise in a society where silence is suspect.

We’re similarly becoming a nation of totalitarian nitwits, speaking in a borrowed lexicon of mandatory phrases and smelling heresy in anyone who doesn’t.

This cult reflex was bad during the Russiagate years, but it’s gone into overdrive since the arrival of COVID. The CNN writer who thinks it’s necessary to put a disclaimer in the lede of a story about molnupiravir, of all things, is basically claiming he or she is afraid a theoretical unvaccinated person might otherwise read the story and be encouraged to not take the vaccine.

Except, if that theoretical unvaccinated person could be convinced by anything CNN said or did, they’d have already gotten the shot, because the network runs ten million stories a day directly imploring people to get vaccinated or die. News flash: the instinct to armor-plate even unrelated news subjects with layer after layer of insistent vaccine dogma is not for the non-immunized, who mostly don’t watch outlets like CNN or read the New York Times.

Outlets apply that neurotic messaging for their own target audiences, who’ve been trained to live in terror of un-contextualized content, which everyone knows leads to Trump, fascism, and death.

I’d be the last person to claim there aren’t dumb people out there in America, but at least the audiences of channels like Fox and OAN know that content has been designed for them. The people gobbling down these pieces by Bloomberg and the Times that have the journalistic equivalent of child-proof caps on every paragraph that even parenthetically mentions COVID really believe that content has been dumbed down for some other person. They think it’s someone else who can’t handle news that vaccines work and that there also might be a pill that treats the disease, without freaking out or coming to politically unsafe conclusions. So they put up with being talked to like children — demand it, even. Which is nuts. Right? It is nuts, isn’t it?

Dr. Richard Urso: End the Pandemic with Early Treatment

Posted on October 7, 2021 by Ron Clutz

Drug Inventor Urso: Are We Underutilizing Early Treatment?

We cannot use a one-size fits all approach to fighting Covid

Dr. Richard Urso is a scientist, sole inventor of an FDA-approved wound healing drug, and the Former Director of Orbital Oncology at MD Anderson Cancer Center. He believes we cannot use a one-size-fits-all approach to fighting Covid.

“We are not going to vaccinate our way out of this,” he said. “There’s no reason to not use anti-inflammatories against inflammatory disease. I used steroids in March and people were saying, ‘Why are you using steroids for inflammatory for this viral disease?’ And I said, ‘Because it’s not a viral disease.’”

Urso says mass lockdowns and waiting for a vaccine never made a lot of sense to him. He calls for a multi-pronged strategy includes targeted vaccination programs, but also early treatment and prevention measures.

“Early treatment should have been part of the equation. I’m not against all those other things. Contagion control is important. Washing our hands. Things like that. They’re all important. Do we need vaccination programs? Absolutely. Do we need early treatment programs? Absolutely. So we have basically put the cart before the horse. The tail is wagging the dog. Early treatment should be a mainstay for everything.”

Background from previous post 3000+ Doctors Declaration for Medical Rights and Freedoms

Update October 7, 2021 Presently 10,000+ medical practitioners have signed the declaration

By Debra Heine writes at American Greatness Over 3,000 Doctors and Scientists Sign Declaration Accusing COVID Policy-Makers of ‘Crimes Against Humanity’. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and images.

More resources are available at Global Climate Summit

A group of physicians and scientists met in Rome, Italy earlier this month for a three day Global Covid Summit to speak “truth to power about Covid pandemic research and treatment.”

The summit, which was held from September 12 to September 14, gave the medical professionals an opportunity to compare studies, and assess the efficacy of the various treatments that have been developed in hospitals, doctors offices and research labs throughout the world.

The Physicians’ Declaration was first read at the Rome Covid Summit, catalyzing an explosion of active support from medical scientists and physicians around the globe. These professionals were not expecting career threats, character assassination, papers and research censored, social accounts blocked, search results manipulated, clinical trials and patient observations banned, and their professional history and accomplishments altered or omitted in academic and mainstream media.

The document, reprinted below in its entirety, sprang from that conference.

Thousands have died from Covid as a result of being denied life-saving early treatment. The Declaration is a battle cry from physicians who are daily fighting for the right to treat their patients, and the right of patients to receive those treatments – without fear of interference, retribution or censorship by government, pharmacies, pharmaceutical corporations, and big tech. We demand that these groups step aside and honor the sanctity and integrity of the patient-physician relationship, the fundamental maxim “First Do No Harm”, and the freedom of patients and physicians to make informed medical decisions. Lives depend on it.

We the physicians of the world, united and loyal to the Hippocratic Oath, recognizing the profession of medicine as we know it is at a crossroad, are compelled to declare the following;

WHEREAS, it is our utmost responsibility and duty to uphold and restore the dignity, integrity, art and science of medicine;

WHEREAS, there is an unprecedented assault on our ability to care for our patients;

WHEREAS, public policy makers have chosen to force a “one size fits all” treatment strategy, resulting in needless illness and death, rather than upholding fundamental concepts of the individualized, personalized approach to patient care which is proven to be safe and more effective;

WHEREAS, physicians and other health care providers working on the front lines, utilizing their knowledge of epidemiology, pathophysiology and pharmacology, are often first to identify new, potentially life saving treatments;

WHEREAS, physicians are increasingly being discouraged from engaging in open professional discourse and the exchange of ideas about new and emerging diseases, not only endangering the essence of the medical profession, but more importantly, more tragically, the lives of our patients;

WHEREAS, thousands of physicians are being prevented from providing treatment to their patients, as a result of barriers put up by pharmacies, hospitals, and public health agencies, rendering the vast majority of healthcare providers helpless to protect their patients in the face of disease. Physicians are now advising their patients to simply go home (allowing the virus to replicate) and return when their disease worsens, resulting in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary patient deaths, due to failure-to-treat;

WHEREAS, this is not medicine. This is not care. These policies may actually constitute crimes against humanity.

NOW THEREFORE, IT IS:

RESOLVED, that the physician-patient relationship must be restored. The very heart of medicine is this relationship, which allows physicians to best understand their patients and their illnesses, to formulate treatments that give the best chance for success, while the patient is an active participant in their care.

RESOLVED, that the political intrusion into the practice of medicine and the physician/patient relationship must end. Physicians, and all health care providers, must be free to practice the art and science of medicine without fear of retribution, censorship, slander, or disciplinary action, including possible loss of licensure and hospital privileges, loss of insurance contracts and interference from government entities and organizations – which further prevent us from caring for patients in need. More than ever, the right and ability to exchange objective scientific findings, which further our understanding of disease, must be protected.

RESOLVED, that physicians must defend their right to prescribe treatment, observing the tenet FIRST, DO NO HARM. Physicians shall not be restricted from prescribing safe and effective treatments. These restrictions continue to cause unnecessary sickness and death. The rights of patients, after being fully informed about the risks and benefits of each option, must be restored to receive those treatments.

RESOLVED, that we invite physicians of the world and all health care providers to join us in this noble cause as we endeavor to restore trust, integrity and professionalism to the practice of medicine.

RESOLVED, that we invite the scientists of the world, who are skilled in biomedical research and uphold the highest ethical and moral standards, to insist on their ability to conduct and publish objective, empirical research without fear of reprisal upon their careers, reputations and livelihoods.

RESOLVED, that we invite patients, who believe in the importance of the physician-patient relationship and the ability to be active participants in their care, to demand access to science-based medical care.

Scottish High Court Dismisses Greenpeace “End-Use Emissions” Argument

Posted on October 7, 2021 by Ron Clutz

The Guardian reports on the ruling in its article Greenpeace loses North Sea Vorlich field legal challenge. H/T Tallbloke’s Talkshop Excerpts in my bolds.

Permission to drill the Vorlich site off Aberdeen was given to BP in 2018.

Greenpeace argued in Scotland’s highest civil court there had been “a myriad of failures in the public consultation” and the permit did not consider the climate impacts of burning fossil fuel.

The Court of Session ruling means operations will continue at the field. Greenpeace plans to appeal.

Production from the development started in November after BP was granted approval by the Oil and Gas Authority (OGA) in 2018.

The UK government welcomed the outcome.

The text of the ruling is Opinion of the Court Greenpeace Ltd. vs. BP Ltd.

The procedural complaints were dismissed as being without merit. The excerpts below (in italics with my bolds) address the activist theory of disallowing oil production and transportation based upon CO2 emissions of the end users consuming the energy products.

[38] The indirect emissions challenge was res judicata. Permission to proceed had been refused by the High Court. In any event, the challenge was without merit. The Directive was concerned with the effect of the individual project, not the use of material extracted in the course of a project. The focus was on the particular “project”. The definitions provided no support for the contention that the end use of raw materials, after further processes such as refinement to create a different product, was a relevant consideration (R (Finch) v Surrey County Council, at paras [101]-[102] and [109-112]).

[39] Direct emissions from the end use of oil and gas in the UK were considered and taken into account in the UK’s Annual Statement of Emissions. These were matters for political judgment (R (Plan B Earth) v Secretary of State for Transport [2021] PTSR 1901 at paras [2] and [281]), which were not challengeable in an appeal under regulation 16. The determination of a carbon budget for the UK was a complex, high-level strategic decision. Indigenous oil and gas development was an important part of the transition to a low carbon economy. This was all part of the existing framework, which sought to manage the UK’s progressive decarbonisation up to the year 2050 (cf R (Packham) v Secretary of State for Transport [2021] Env LR 10 at paras 83 and 87).

[40] The production of oil from the Vorlich field did not increase the use of oil. The appellants’ position, that as a matter of principle there should be no new oil, conflated and confused different questions. The scope of an EIA was a matter of judgment, so long as the information in it was accurate.

The environmental effects of the consumption of oil and gas

Merits

[63] The relevant considerations which require to be taken into account in an environmental impact assessment, notably when the applicant is preparing his Environmental Statement, are set out in regulation 3A. So far as is relevant to the current appeal, the applicant is required to assess the direct and indirect significant effects of the project on, amongst other elements, the climate and the operational effects of the relevant project. In this area, regulation 3A(2) mirrors the terms of the Directive (Art 3.1). Again, there is no issue concerning any lack of adequate transposition.

[64] The question is whether the consumption of oil and gas by the end user, once the oil and gas have been extracted from the wells, transported, refined and sold to consumers, and then used by them are “direct or indirect significant effects of the relevant project”. The answer is that it is not. The exercise which the applicant had to carry out, and the Secretary of State had to assess, was a determination of the significant effects of drilling the two wells and removing the oil and gas. That involved considering the effects of depositing and operating an exploration rig or rigs on site. The ultimate use of a finished product is not a direct or indirect significant effect of the project. It is that effect alone which, in terms of the Regulations, must be assessed.

[65] The court agrees with the reasoning in R (Finch) v Surrey County Council [2021] PTSR 1160 in which Holgate J reached the same conclusion in relation to what is a direct or indirect effect of a “development”; in that case the drilling of new oil and gas wells on land. As Holgate J stated (at para 101):

“The extraction of a mineral from a site may have environmental consequences remote from that development but which are nevertheless inevitable. …[T]he true legal test is whether an effect on the environment is an effect of the development for which planning permission is sought. An inevitable consequence may occur after a raw material extracted on the relevant site has passed through one or more developments elsewhere which are not the subject of the application… and which do not form part of the same ‘project’.”

However broad and purposive an interpretation of the Regulations or the Directive might be attempted, the clearly expressed wording of the legislation cannot be disregarded (ibid at paras 103-104). It is the effect of the project, and its operation, that is to be considered and not that of the consumption of any retailed product ultimately emerging as a result of a refinement of the raw material.

[68] It would not be practicable, in an assessment of the environmental effects of a project for the extraction of fossil fuels, for the decision maker to conduct a wide ranging examination into the effects, local or global, of the use of that fuel by the final consumer. Although the appellants’ aspiration is for such extraction to cease, it does not appear to be contended that the UK economy is not still reliant in a number of different ways on the consumption of oil and gas. At present, a shortage of oil and gas supplies is a matter of public concern. The argument is, in any event, an academic one. It is not maintained that the exploitation of the Vorlich field would increase, or even maintain, the current level of consumption. Unless it did so, it is difficult to argue that it would have any material effect on climate change; even if it is possible to arrive at a figure for its contribution by arithmetical calculation relative to the production of oil and gas overall. The Secretary of State’s submission that these are matters for decision at a relatively high level of Government, rather than either by the court or in relation to one oilfield project, is correct. The issue is essentially a political and not a legal one.

My Comment

Recent years have seen an huge increase in legal attacks funded by woke wealthy people with deep pockets against the supply of fossil fuels. At the same time governments have loaded up regulatory regimes that impede or prevent additional development of FF energy resources. Instead of appreciating how essential are these fuels to modern societies, policy makers, and in many cases judges, are motivated by the slogan “keep it in the ground.” As in the opinion above, shortages in fossil fuels supply are a public concern, and especially worrisome as we approach winter. Despite this, the activist strategy is to cut off supply of affordable, reliable energy even when alternatives like renewables will not replace them, and let the people do without.

At least in this ruling the judiciary got it right.

Winter Fuel Short Due to CO2 Hysteria

Posted on October 5, 2021 by Ron Clutz

David Blackmon writes at Forbes Winter Is Coming: Can Energy Catastrophe Be Averted? Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Bank of America said in a note on Friday that the price for crude oil could exceed $100 per barrel over the winter and precipitate a global economic crisis, as reported by BNN Bloomberg. In its note, BofA cites the possibility of an unusually cold winter, higher aviation demand and potential gas-to-oil switching in power generation as factors that could create a further run-up in oil prices, which have already risen by almost 60% since January.

For Japan, Korea and much of Europe, natural gas prices have already climbed to levels that are considerably higher than the price for crude on a per barrel equivalent basis. Further increases could support switching from gas to fuel oil in power generation, but only where such switching is still available. Many western nations have forced the elimination of that ability due to environmental considerations as governments and companies have responded to pressures from the green lobby and the ESG investor community.

That is of course just one more example of the kinds of premature and frankly irrational energy choices governments – including the U.S. – have been making in the past few years to try to hasten this “energy transition,” forcing the replacement of reliable, high-density energy sources like fossil fuels and nuclear with low-density energy sources like wind, solar and electric vehicles powered by lithium-ion batteries.

Several MEPs (mainly Greens) hold up anti-nuclear posters at the debate.

The energy crisis in Western Europe this summer has been brought on by premature retirements of hundreds of coal and natural gas power plants in favor of massive over-reliance on wind power and, to a lesser extent, solar. Ironically, this crisis is taking place just as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and congressional Democrats attempt to ram through their massive $3.5 “budget reconciliation” bill that is in large part designed to recreate the European model in the United States.

As Allysia Finley reported in the Wall Street Journal last week, In the past decade the U.K. and Europe have shut down hundreds of coal plants, and Britain has only two remaining. Spain shut down half of its coal plants last summer. European countries have spent trillions of dollars subsidizing renewables, which last year for the first time exceeded fossil fuels as a share of electricity production. The problem with this strategy this year has been the fact that the wind has pretty much stopped blowing in Europe, causing governments that spent the last decade retiring coal and natural gas plants to scramble to re-activate them. European officials resorted to cleaner-burning natural gas first, and the resulting added demand for natural gas has led to record U.S. exports of LNG to Europe, which in turn has caused a spike in global LNG prices.

Thus we see the consequence of a mass decision by European governments to attempt to violate the laws of physics by trying to replace high-density energy sources with low-density energy sources now resulting in their colliding with the laws of supply and demand.

It is in the face of this looming energy crisis in Europe largely precipitated by these policy decisions that the Biden administration and congressional Democrats have spent the past week attempting to move their “budget reconciliation” bill, which is mainly a social welfare and Green New Deal funding bill. This massive piece of legislation is loaded up with hundreds of billions of dollars in new subsidies, mandates and incentives for these very same intermittent, low-density energy sources, along with new taxes and draconian regulatory actions designed to drive up the cost of fossil fuels in power generation and transportation.

It would be one thing for leaders in Washington, DC to engage in this exercise if the needed battery storage technology for those low-density energy sources existed on a wide scale. But, as I’ve documented here this year, while progress in research has been made, no such technology currently exists on a meaningful, scalable basis. Making matters even more tenuous, the producers of the array of critical minerals needed for the existing lithium-ion technology currently in limited use for power generation and essential for EVs are scrambling to figure out how they are going to meet new demand that is projected to rise by as much as 4,000 percent by 2040 for their products, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

Of course the “clean energy transition policies” bear some responsibility for this run-up in energy prices. Every new regulation, no matter how noble-minded, has a cost, and the “energy transition” has already demanded wave after wave of new regulation on fossil fuels. Claiming these actions bear no cost or consequence is simply absurd.

Plus, it’s not just the policies of the transition at play here. The ESG-related demands of the investor community, which have limited access to capital for fossil fuel producers and demanded that they shift big portions of their capital budgets over to “green” energy initiatives, have also played a significant role in driving up fossil fuel prices. This is not even arguable:

In fact, it’s a key part of the “green” strategy to raise the cost of fossil fuels so that these other “green” energy sources become more competitive in the marketplace.

While the news about the energy crisis focuses in on Europe right now, the truth is that this is rapidly becoming a global crisis impacting global markets. Officials like Birol and the commissioners at FERC may not want to admit it, but the truth is that just 9 months ago, crude oil was cheap, gasoline and diesel at the pump were cheap, natural gas was cheap and all were in seemingly plentiful supply. Today, just 270 days later, oil is $80 and projected to move to triple digits, gasoline at the pump costs $1 per gallon more in the U.S. than it did in January, natural gas prices have doubled in the U.S. and more than quadrupled in parts of Asia and European governments are scrambling to figure out where their supplies for the winter will be sourced.

The stark reality is that there will be no quick fixes from here, for the simple fact that none are available. The senseless policy decisions that helped create this crisis took a decade to fully implement, and will take at least that long to reverse if policymakers should decide to come to their senses. As demand for oil and natural gas rise to new global heights, both Wood MacKenzie and Rystad Energy have issued recent reports showing that the last half-decade has seen an under-investment in the finding of new reserves that runs into the hundreds of billions of dollars. That is not something that can be remedied overnight.

At the end of the day, despite all the prevailing narratives flying around, the world’s energy future will be governed as it always has: By the laws of physics, supply and demand. It is becoming fearfully evident right now that the policy decisions made by governments in Europe, the U.S. and other parts of the world during the last decade have violated all three of those immutable laws.

As a result, winter is coming, and potential energy disaster is coming with it.

Why “Hispanics” is Wrong and Dangerous

Posted on October 5, 2021 by Ron Clutz

This is an informed and timely perspective from a person attributed to be a member of the above “group” in order to join a socio-political US revolution. Mike Gonzalez explains in an interview with Doug Blair at Daily Signal Why Hispanic Heritage Month Shouldn’t Be a Thing. Excerpts of transcript with my bolds and images.

Overview

We’re in the first week of Hispanic Heritage Month, yet another 30 days of identity-focused celebration, following on the heels of Black History Month in February and Gay Pride Month in June.

But although the ubiquity of the terms “Hispanic” and “Latino” might make it seem that they’ve always been there, Heritage Foundation senior fellow Mike Gonzalez contends that those terms were invented by Marxist activists attempting to persuade so-called Hispanics that they were oppressed.

“I’m very proud of [my heritage], but this amalgamation, this artificial label that is created, the officiality of it is what I’m opposed to, because I know that it is done on purpose and with malice aforethought toward the country of the United States,” Gonzalez says.

The veteran journalist and communicator joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the Marxist history of terms such as “Hispanic” and “Latino,” and to detail the radical left’s plans to use identity politics to seize power.

Doug Blair: Our guest today is Mike Gonzalez, a Heritage Foundation senior fellow for foreign policy as well as the Angeles T. Arredondo e pluribus unum fellow. He is also the author of the new book “BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution,” highlighting the Marxist underpinnings of the Black Lives Matter movement. Mike, thank you so much for joining us.

Interview

Blair: I wanted to have you on the show today to discuss Hispanic Heritage Month. You’ve done a lot of really fascinating research on terms like Hispanic and Latino and where they come from. So to start off, could you explain to our listeners a brief history of the invention of these terms?

Gonzalez: So, if by Hispanic Heritage Month we were celebrating what unites, actually, all the “Hispanics” in the United States, that is the founding by the Iberian kingdoms of Portugal, Spain of their lands, I probably wouldn’t have any problem with that. I think that we should learn more about Columbus’ exploration, his brave courageous trek across the ocean to join all of humanity finally together. Leif Erikson, a Viking, is said to have done it, but Leif Erikson was not interested in uniting humanity and forging new and permanent links as Columbus did.

If we mean that, then by all means. If we mean the wondrous actions of Junípero Serra in the West to bring the promise of salvation and Christ to the natives of that land; if we mean by no means all good, but still very brave exploration of Cuba, Mexico, Peru, etc. by Velázquez and Cortes and Pizarro, and looking at all aspects of it, looking at the good things they did and the bad things they did; then yeah, I would be for that kind of Hispanic Heritage Month.

What I’m not for is for the creation of a Hispanic category by leftists—well, the instigation of the creation—because the leftist activists in the ’70s were the ones who really went all out and prodded the bureaucracy, a very reluctant bureaucracy, I must add, who did not want to do it, starting in the late ’60s and culminating in 1977, when OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, finally created the Hispanic category.

And the culmination, I guess, would’ve been when it’s placed on the 1980 census for the first time, and this very large and growing group of Americans are hauled off and counted away from the other races that are recognized by anthropologists, not by leftist activists acting on the pay of the Ford Foundation.

So that is what I’m against. And the reason I’m against it, we can go into that later on, depending on what questions you ask, because it is very clear from the beginning that it is done in order to instill grievances in the members of this category in order to transform the country.

Blair: So what it sounds like you’re saying is that these terms like Hispanic and Latino were not naturally occurring. They weren’t invented by the communities that they were invented to describe. It sounds like these were pushed by leftist academics.

So with that being said, do you consider yourself Hispanic?

Gonzalez: So, opposition came not only from the bureaucrats, it also came from the grassroots. The grassroots wanted no part of this. They were the only people that were interested in doing this. And they were very adamant that Hispanic be created. … They always say, the activists, they hate colonization, but Hispanic and Latin America are both words that are used by colonizers.

I consider myself an American, to be honest. I consider myself a father, first of all; a husband; a Catholic, that’s an affiliation that’s very important to me; an American. I consider myself a Cuban American also, although that is less important than the other things I mentioned.

First, I’m very proud of the contributions of Cuban Americans to this country. . .Very proud of my family. I love my family. I love the history of my family, what it accomplished both in Cuba and in Spain before, because I have very recent ancestors, grandparents who are Spaniards. . .My immigrant grandfather, my immigrant five great grandparents, all of whom were poor, who came from Northern Spain and made it in Cuba.

So I’m very proud of all that, but this amalgamation, this artificial label that is created, the officiality of it is what I’m opposed to, because I know that it is done on purpose and with malice and aforethought toward the country of the United States.

Blair: With that history in mind, and with the way you view yourself in mind, I’m curious, what are the views of the communities that these terms were invented to describe, South and Central Mexican nationals, on terms like Latino and Hispanic? Are these terms popular with them? And then further on, how have these terms been embraced by the wider American population? Is this something that they accept as well?

Gonzalez: Well … I don’t know 58 million of them personally. It’s funny, every time somebody says to me, “Hey, do you know this Cuban?”, it’s like, “Nah, there’s almost 2 million Cuban Americans. We don’t really know each other, all of them.”

Look, we can only look at the opinion polls. Pew Research, every poll that I’ve looked at—Pew is very good by the way. It’s center-left and the analysis is center-left, but if you look at the numbers that Pew puts out, I swear by them. And what they find is that between 20% and 25% uses Hispanic or Latino. The rest uses Dominican or Mexican or Puerto Rican or American.

So the Hispanic and Latino—I’d love to get into Latino, by the way, because that story is not known at all. And of course, Latinx, that term only known to NPR and [President] Joe Biden. I can tell you that nobody in Miami is having a cafecito thinking he’s Latinx, and nobody walks into a bodega in Manhattan thinking she’s Latinx. My goodness, my goodness.

Blair: Well, I’m really glad that you actually brought that up, because as radical leftists kind of continue their war on language, and as they decide that these terms are not far enough, Latino and Latinx are now these things. Chicanx, I’ve heard a couple of times. I mean, how does this evolution of identity-based language, like, Latinx, Chicanx, and all these other crazy ones, how does this play into the sort of Marxist underpinnings of the phrases themselves?

Gonzalez: By the way, I often tweet that I did the Ancestry test and I came back 55% Hispanix, 20% Portugex, 20% Irix, and less than 1% Indiax.

So what they do is they create these categories. … And they’re very open about this, by the way. If you listen to Maria Teresa Kumar, who is wonderful in her ability to just speak the truth, sometimes when she’s on Chuck Todd or doing a show with Nikole Hannah-Jones, she will say, “Look, it’s really, really hard.” She’s the head of Voto Latino. “It’s really, really hard to instill grievances into the members of these categories, because they’re not aware that they’re being oppressed.”

This is, of course, pure and classic critical theory and critical legal theory and critical race theory. They believe from the beginning that what happens is that the members of the population are not aware of their oppression.

[Max] Horkheimer, one of the godfathers of critical theory, writes in the 1930s that, “One cannot rely on the proletariat to overthrow the system because the proletariat will not understand that he’s suppressed. He has no idea that he’s suppressed.” His assistant, Herbert Marcuse, then writes in the 1960s that, “Liberation can only start with the consciousness of servitude.”

And so it is with these activists and the heads of these groups, who grab an immigrant from Uruguay or his progeny and say, “You might be happy here. You may have fought really hard to leave Guerrero, Mexico, and immigrate to this country, and you may think this is the land of opportunity and milk and honey, but you’re wrong. You’re enslaved. You’re oppressed. The dissatisfaction of your material needs through capitalism, even though you’re happy with your Wi-Fi and your split-level home, this is a very oppressive, superstructure.”

In fact, in order to apply for the incentives to do this, you get maybe a preference for a city contract, but in order to get a preference for a city contract, you must write down how you were discriminated against 30 years ago. You must never forget. And my goodness, you must never forgive.

So this is very well thought out, and it works if we let it work.

Blair: The question is now, why? What is the motivation here? Is it to bring a new Marxist world order? What is the end goal here?

Gonzalez: Oh, no, of course it is. It is exactly that. It’s liberation. And they say that.

By the way, notice how Marxists never really promise liberty or freedom, because they know they’re not promising liberty or freedom. What they’re promising is liberation because they believe in the oppressed/oppressor narrative. And so they say, “It’s liberation from oppression that we’re after.” And yes, very much so.

And the penny drops for Herbert Marcuse and he writes that, “It is in the ghetto population,” his words, “that you’ll have the revolutionary agents. They must continue to be guided by a communist, a Marxist intellectual class.” They need to have revolutionary consciousness, which he doesn’t believe they have, but they have revolutionary potential, and he sees that they can be prodded into violence.

And you’re quite right, that the unique and exceptional suffering of black Americans, that suffering must be analogized to these new groups, which is wrong, it’s false. And it is in many ways just ugly because obviously, I or my family, my name is Gonzalez, famously, and nothing like what happened to African Americans happened to my family or to anybody named Gonzalez.

That’s not to say that people named Gonzalez did not experience discrimination, especially in Texas and parts of the Southwest. Earlier on in the last century, that was very real, and there’s very substantial evidence of it. And we know from the experience that they relate that that happened, but nothing ever approximates what blacks suffered in this country.

Blair: So we’ve seen some of the consequences of this kind of hyperfocalization or hyperintense scrutiny of race and identity on American politics and American social cohesion. What do you think are some of the most severe consequences of the left’s push to push everything through this lens of race, including Hispanic and black?

Gonzalez: Well, we see it today. I mean, all the polls tell us that Americans, a majority—a substantial majority, not just a plurality, but a substantial majority of Americans—today believe that race relations are the worst they’ve ever been.

We’ve had riots. 2020, we’ve had a spike in the murder rate of 30%—30%. That’s an extra 5,000 people dead in 2020, I believe mostly because of the riots and the instability, which took place mostly because of the instigation of the organization of the Black Lives Matter organizations, obviously, with an assist from Antifa, although Antifa does not have the organizing muscle or the cache or the money that Black Lives Matter has.

So we’ve seen the invasion of critical race theory into all aspects of our lives: how kids are being divided according to race; how white kids have been told that they’re racist and that they are oppressors and they have privilege and black kids are being told what Derrick Bell said, that they will never gain equality with whites, which is false and disgusting to say that to a black child. That’s a form of child abuse.

It’s also child abuse to tell a black child or a kid named Rodriguez that numeracy or literacy or punctuality or linear thinking or the use of reason are not things for them, that sitting in their desk and being quiet and following what the teacher says and paying attention and doing homework are white things.

My goodness. [These are] things that would’ve made the Grand Dragon of the KKK blush 20 years ago, and now is being repeated in our classrooms and we’re paying for it as taxpayers. We’re being trained in our places of work, under penalty of being fired.

This is all wrong and very wrong. And that’s the reason that the American people are rebelling against this.

Blair: On that note, I’m curious, if we want to talk about issues relating to this specific subsect of people, is there a way that we can refer to these groups without using these sort of racialized terms like Hispanic or Latino? Does it make sense to talk about things, for example, like the Hispanic vote?

Gonzalez: No, that one makes absolutely no sense.

So, the largest group in America, largest nation of origin group, are Mexican Americans. I think they may be 38 million today. And it makes no sense whatsoever to talk about the Mexican American vote, just like it really makes no sense to talk about the German vote—that’s the largest group—or the Irish vote anymore. The Irish vote has been split now, I believe, since the ’60s.

The Mexican American vote in some parts like the Rio Grande Valley is going heavily conservative, heavily Republican; in the cities of Texas, especially among the young, it is going the other way. It’s going not just the Democrats or liberals, but heavily progressive. So I hesitate to talk about the Mexican American vote.

The Hispanic vote makes zero sense because you have Puerto Ricans voting differently in Florida than they do in Hartford or New York or Philadelphia; Cubans voting definitely massively one way in Miami and then that’s not the way they vote in Houston; the Mexican Americans voting in Houston or East LA.

There’s such an animal as the Cuban vote in Miami. That is part of reality. And if you are in that business, then you should talk about it and think of it that way.

I’m told that there’s even such a thing as the Irish vote in Boston. No longer do we have really the Dutch vote in the Hudson River Valley as we did in the days of Jackson, Andy Jackson.

Blair: So my final question for you is, do you think this fight against racial fragmentation and the left’s campaign to do this is a fight that conservatives are winning? And as a secondary follow-up, what are we doing well specifically and where do we need to shore up our defenses?

Gonzalez: I think conservatives have begun well by identifying the problem, talking about it, freezing it. I think the left has been caught by surprise.

By the way, the left doesn’t know what critical race theory is, obviously, or they’re just lying when they say that it is not critical race theory to talk about systemic racism. That is just a lie, that’s just ignorance.

I don’t blame them, but the majority is definitely against them. And they’re playing with fire.

Climate Tyranny By Way of Criminal Law

Posted on October 4, 2021 by Ron Clutz

Dr. Lucas Bergkamp writes at Real Clear Energy The Legal Doctrine of “Carbon Crimes”—Torturing Law and Reason to Rid the Planet of Climate Change Deniers. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Abstract

The climate movement has discovered criminal law as a tool for conducting climate politics. To complement civil lawsuits against states and corporations, the movement’s activists intend to invoke torture and a newly proposed crime of “ecocide” to target corporate executives, politicians, and others who stand in the way of their preferred policies. In pushing their agenda, these activists receive assistance from the judiciary—specifically, the European Court of Human Rights.

The use of criminal law to pursue climate politics is a further step in the radicalization of the climate movement and poses a threat to economic and political freedoms, the rule of law, and democracy.

If the movement is able to realize its plans, all those who do not support ambitious climate policies would have to fear prosecution and imprisonment. Conversely, threatening criminal sanctions against politicians and corporate executives will create powerful incentives to adopt ambitious climate policies and the dominant pro-climate narrative.

Lucas Bergkamp explains how criminal law, in the climate movement’s vision, should supplement civil and administrative law to eliminate any and all opposition to its plans for the realization of a climate utopia.

European government of judges

Over several decades, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has evolved into a European government in itself. Based on doctrines designed to enable it to expand its powers at its discretion, the Court has enacted a series of mandates for new laws and policies for Europe. There is little democratic control over the Court’s role in advancing progressive politics. Once the Court has spoken, national parliaments are unable to undo its pontification because a human right trumps national law; national judiciaries are compelled to execute the Court’s judgments, even if their own national law provides otherwise.

While imposing its high moral demands on executive governments, the Court believes itself to be quite exempt from any moral or legal constraints. In a previous contribution, I discussed how climate change litigation before the Court has undermined the rule of law, the separation of powers, and democracy. In this article, I focus on the Court’s role in criminalizing the climate debate. Its reckless disregard of judicial impartiality, the right to a fair trial, and judicial restraint is another manifestation of the Court’s support for the progressive movement.

The rationale supporting criminalization

The argument for criminalizing “climate denial” typically boils down to the following argument articulated by Jeremy Williams:

Given what we know and have known for decades about climate change, to deny the science, deceive the public, and willfully obstruct any serious response to the climate catastrophe is to allow entire countries and cultures to disappear. It is to rob … the poorest and most vulnerable on the planet of their land, their homes, their livelihoods, even their lives—and their children’s lives, and their children’s children’s lives. For profit. And for power…. These are crimes. They are crimes against the earth, and they are crimes against humanity.

This emotional outcry is not only an impenetrable amalgamation of factual and moral reasoning but also assumes what must be proved. To prevent disaster, rationality needs to be brought back into the analysis. Unfortunately, as the ECHR demonstrates, we cannot rely on the judiciary to do so.

“Climate emergency”

The European Court of Human Rights, to which its president refers as the “European Climate Change Court,” has used the opportunity presented by the climate litigation that it invited to take the lead in criminalizing the climate debate. It has done so in a number of ways. First, the Court’s president and one of its vice presidents have declared publicly that “we are facing a dire emergency that requires concerted action by all of humanity” and that “we will face the collapse of everything that gives us our security.” Thus, the Court’s leaders have openly and unreservedly endorsed the climate movement’s alarmist rhetoric. They have done so not based on science but on alarmist declarations by Sir David Attenborough, a well-known biologist and climate activist.

Second, to prevent any argument on the facts, the judges added: “No one can legitimately call into question that we are facing a dire emergency that requires concerted action by all of humanity.” They also committed the Court to the cause: “For its part, the European Court of Human Rights will play its role within the boundaries of its competences as a court of law, forever mindful that Convention guarantees must be effective and real, not illusory.”

No right to a fair trial for deniers

By issuing these warnings, the Court effectively closed down any debate on climate change and climate science before any trial has even begun. In doing so, it deprived defendant states of an important argument to defend themselves against allegations that their climate policies are inadequate to fight the alleged climate crisis. Before they could present the relevant scientific evidence showing that there is no such thing as climate emergency or climate crisis, the Court’s leading judges told the defendant states that they should not dare to deny.

By labeling any argument that there is no climate crisis “illegitimate,” these leading European judges, who should serve as examples of judicial impartiality, have endorsed the climate movement’s climate-denier rhetoric. This rhetoric is an inappropriate, unethical play on Holocaust denial. Simultaneously, and directly relevant to this contribution’s subject, the Court’s “illegitimacy” label also raises the specter of criminal prosecution.

There is no climate crisis

It is hard to think of any judicial conduct that shows greater partisanship and disregard for the principle of judicial impartiality than the conduct of these European human rights judges. The right to a fair trial, guaranteed by article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, has effectively been set aside for climate deniers. The question should be asked whether, given the opinions expressed by its leaders, the ECHR can legitimately rule in any climate case.

The Court’s denial of justice is all the more shocking in light of the science, which does not support the proposition that there is a climate crisis. The European Commission has stated: “The term ‘climate emergency’ expresses the political will to fulfil the obligations under the Paris Agreement.” In almost 4,000 pages, the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) AR6 report does not once employ the terms “climate crisis” or “climate emergency” because these terms do not belong to the scientific terminology (they occur only in a descriptive section on communication). Rather, they are political slogans, as the Commission suggested. To the point, the undefined “climate emergency” is an invention by activists.

Judicial threats

Corporate executives of companies deemed to be responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, politicians that do not support ambitious climate policies, and everyone else who advocates against the climate movement’s agenda would be exposed to criminal prosecution and imprisonment of up to 30 years. This is not a far-fetched interpretation of the relevant law but, as explained below, a fairly straightforward application. Obviously, the ECHR was well aware of what it was doing by slipping in “torture,” but it nevertheless felt comfortable proceeding in this manner.

Needless to say, the threat of life imprisonment is a very powerful disincentive. As an academic author for UNESCO put it:

Criminal sanctions are the most potent tools we have to mark out conduct that lies beyond all limits of toleration. Criminal conduct violates basic rights and destroys human security. We reserve the hard treatment of punishment for conduct that damages the things we hold most fundamentally valuable. Climate change is causing precisely such damage.

This seems to be exactly what the judges on the ECHR believe. Corporate executives will have to think twice about corporate climate policies and will be inclined to cave in to activists’ demands. Likewise, politicians skeptical of the current climate policies may feel compelled to give up their resistance. All other dissenters may also be inclined to choose personal security over honesty.

Economic freedom, political freedom, and freedom of speech would be obliterated.

Is this what the Court’s president means when he says that the European Convention guarantees must be “effective and real, not illusory”? The Court’s inexplicable decision to add torture to the charges in the first climate case only adds to the concern that human rights protect only those who endorse progressive causes, not those who have other political preferences.Ecocide

By invoking the crime of torture in the climate debate, the ECHR may also have intended to assist the efforts to get ecocide recognized as a crime. “Ecocide” refers to the “devastation and destruction of the environment,” but no official legal definition yet exists. For decades, greens have been trying to get ecocide recognized as an international crime—but so far, to no avail. In the last two years, however, due to the rise of the climate crisis narrative, they have made significant progress. There now is much activity aimed at persuading international organizations to legislate on ecocide.

In June 2021, an expert panel convened by the Stop Ecocide Foundation published a definition of “ecocide” intended to serve as the basis for an amendment to the Rome Statute of the ICC. Once the Rome Statute is amended to include ecocide, individuals suspected of having committed ecocide can be tried before the ICC.

Moreover, the Rome Statute applies equally to all persons, without any distinction based on official capacity; specifically, elected representatives and government officials are not exempt from criminal responsibility.

Thus, politicians, corporate executives, thought leaders, and anyone else can be subject to criminal prosecution if they express an opinion or pursue a policy deemed to be “anti-climate” that therefore may result in ecocide. In the fight against climate denial, this tool would be of incalculable value.

European Union “leadership”

The European Parliament has referred to ecocide in two recent reports and expressed the wish to recognize ecocide under EU law and diplomacy. To prepare the adoption of an EU directive on ecocide, the European Law Institute launched a project on ecocide. Taking advantage of the momentum, even before this project is finished, the ecocide movement is now pushing to get ecocide included in the EU Environmental Crimes Directive, which is currently being revised.

EU member states control a significant portion of the votes necessary for an amendment of the Rome Statute and can provide incentives to secure the additional votes necessary to get the crime of ecocide adopted. The consequences of such an amendment could be enormous if the ICC follows the example of the ECHR and jumps onto the climate activists’ bandwagon.

Climate change is ecocide

Make no mistake: while the definition of ecocide is broad and vague, the primary target of the ecocide movement is climate change. Civil liability law and human rights law give climate activists the tools to force governments and companies to comply with their demands, but this kind of litigation is expensive and takes time. The new crime of ecocide would give them a powerful instrument to shortcut the process by threatening criminal sanctions against corporate directors and officers, as well as reluctant politicians and opinion leaders, and to force them to change their ways.

Climate activists also believe that the term “ecocide” will have an emotive and stigmatizing effect that “causing climate change” does not have. As one author puts it:

The term “ecocide” sounds dramatic. It is more emotive than “contributing to pollution” or “increasing greenhouse gas emissions” or “investing in fossil fuels.” It communicates the gravity and urgency of the irreversible destruction being inflicted on the environment. It unambiguously casts major polluters as “villains,” perpetrators of a crime (emphasis added).

No protection

National laws do not protect the suspects. Under the proposed definition of the international panel, ecocide means “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts.” Note that “unlawful,” which is broader than “illegal,” is the gateway to disregarding permits for emissions and compliance of activities and products with national laws.

The main trick is that this definition does not require any actual damage; knowledge of likely damage in the future is enough—which is a given, in light of the “settled science” set forth in the IPCC reports. Fundamental principles of criminal law are merely an afterthought, if they are on the radar screen at all.

Torturing human rights and criminal law

Needless to say, the ECHR’s suggestion that governments “torture” their citizens by implementing “inadequate climate policy” is both insulting to torture victims and unlawful. The inclusion of torture in a climate-policy lawsuit is the culmination of the Court’s progressive move away from a human rights adjudicator to a social policymaking institution. This activism has not only harmed the Court’s reputation as an impartial court of law but has also created serious problems for national legislatures faced with the often unhinged policy mandates imposed by the Court.

To be sure, we do have a torture problem, but it is not the European climate policymakers who are doing the torturing. Rather, the Court itself has tortured the law to fit its own ideology.

The Court tortured the European Convention on Human Rights until it confessed that it is a program for progressive politics. It tortured the right to life and several other human rights until they agreed to include within their scope a whole series of so-called positive obligations, which only the Court gets to define. Perhaps most egregious, the Court tortured the Convention until it gave the Court the right to waive essential requirements imposed by the Convention to eliminate any limits on its jurisdiction, which then allowed the Court to move forward with the first climate change case, which it so desperately wanted.The crime of climate change

The use of criminal law to pursue climate politics is a new chapter in the climate-litigation saga. Climate activists have discovered criminal law as a tremendously effective tool for climate politics. Governments and corporations can be subordinated through civil and human rights law, but to put pressure on corporate executives and politicians, criminal law is much more effective. Criminal law is the crowbar that pries open the doors to the boardrooms and the chambers where policy decisions are made.

What is remarkable is that the activists include not only the nongovernmental organizations that claim to “fight for the climate” but also Europe’s highest judges at the European Court of Human Rights. Are the limits on its authority really lifted by the self-declared crisis?

Lock them up!

In totalitarian states, political dissidents are controlled in three ways: they are removed from public life as a “danger to public order”; they are placed in psychiatric hospitals, since they suffer from mental illness; or they are imprisoned because they have committed crimes. The climate movement’s latest move pursues this third route of “delegitimization” and “denormalization” of its political opponents and those who disagree with the movement.

According to the climate movement, the alleged climate crisis would require urgent action to avert the impending catastrophe and save the planet and humanity. In its view, this requires that democracy, fundamental principles of law, and the limits of judicial power are set aside. In this struggle for survival, the climate movement has concluded that greenhouse gas emissions must be criminalized so that climate deniers can be locked up. Unfortunately, the ECHR has fallen victim to the emotional appeal of the movement’s rhetoric.

Threats to freedom

The climate movement’s strategy is clear: torture and ecocide must be part of its toolbox so that the sinners can be converted, deniers can be punished, and climate utopia can be realized. Inevitably, however, “climatism” results in the suppression of freedom and opens the path to climate totalitarianism. Ironically, the ECHR, which was created in the aftermath of the destruction of the Nazi totalitarian regime to act as a legal bulwark safeguarding individual liberty, has placed itself as the judicial enabler of this process.

How Progressives Took Democracy Hostage

Posted on October 3, 2021 by Ron Clutz

Anthony J. Constantini explains in his American Mind article Democracy’s Progressive Police. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and some added images.

Self-government is hostage to hostile captors.

While people generally welcome democracy in principle—men typically wish to govern themselves—liberal democracy, with its emphasis on sometimes very progressive individual liberties, has been welcomed less and less in recent years. Why? Because as leftist policies have grown more extreme, liberal democracy as a concept has transitioned from support for individual liberty to support for progressive politics, including the full legalization of abortion, full rights for a constantly growing list of sexual minorities, and a belief in multiculturalism as a master value. If a state adopts laws against progressive values, its leader is not merely labeled socially conservative, but is declared to be anti-democratic, even if he was elected democratically and passed laws legally.

Many shrug at these distinctions as merely academic. But all who care about the future of the West should oppose the forced merger of “democracy” and “progressivism.” Far from a matter of semantic disputation, this shifted definition of democracy is a threat to democracy’s survival.

After the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the United States, using methods strikingly similar to the “civilizing” attempts of British and French colonists in the nineteenth century, established a liberal democracy in an attempt to graft Western values into the country. Had the U.S. opted instead for an electoral democracy with elementary protections based on the rule of law, and not attempted to force Western liberalism onto a culture which clearly did not want it, Afghans may, possibly, have been more willing to buy into the system. But a conservative Islamic democracy, with popular local support, was not the model preferred by the U.S. State Department.

The European Union has acted ignominiously toward two of its more conservative members, Poland and Hungary. Poland’s ruling Law and Justice Party (shortened to PiS in Polish) has for years controlled the parliament and the presidency. Due to the party’s conservative policies, some in the opposition, along with progressive European Union bureaucrats, claimed that if PiS were to win the 2020 elections and stay in power it would be the last free election in Polish history. PiS went on to win the elections, but nevertheless, anti-PiS former Polish Prime Minister (and former European Union Council President) Donald Tusk returned to Polish politics to lead the main opposition party. If one believes that Poland just had its last free election, why would anyone wish to head the opposition? The only logical conclusion would be that Polish elections are still free and that those who claimed otherwise were merely trying to scare voters and drum up foreign opposition to a Polish government that insists on putting the interests of Poland above the demands of Brussels.

Similar games are being played against Hungary as well. The ruling Fidesz Party, led by PM Viktor Orbán, banned the dissemination to minors of materials relating to homosexuality. The backlash from liberal democrats was fierce. Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte even stated that Hungary should be expelled from the EU over the law. LGBT rights appear nowhere in the Treaty of Maastricht, the EU’s founding document, nor does any definition of “European” include maximal support for LGBT rights. Hungary went against Western progressivism, and as a result is no longer a true democracy in the eyes of progressives.

But the Fidesz Party has democratically won parliamentary majorities for over a decade, and many Hungarians who do not support Orbán are skeptical of LGBT rights. Orbán is counting on this and has announced a referendum on the law. It is likely the referendum will pass, democratically, by a sizable majority. If Orbán wins the referendum and liberal democrats still attempts to punish Hungary, then it will be indisputable that liberal democrats do not support “democracy” as most people understand it.

This same story has been repeated throughout the West. Italy elects a migrant-skeptical coalition government, and Brussels reacts by tut-tutting the Italians and implying that elements of fascism exist in the democratically-elected coalition. America elects an establishment-skeptical president, and Democrats spend four years delegitimizing the election. Progressives are trying the same thing in Hungary, but this time the hypocrisy is undeniable. When democracy gives liberal democrats power, they accept it. But when democracy produces policies which go against their ideology, they abandon democracy in a heartbeat and just keep the liberalism.

This substituting of definitions fundamentally misunderstands (or purposefully twists) what democracy is supposed to be, and how people see it writ large. When people hear “democracy” they think of the will of the people.

They do not understand that “democracy” is a term of art that refers to whatever policy Western progressives have cooked up at a given time.

By trying to merge the definitions of progressivism and democracy, liberal democrats could ultimately cause the collapse of democracy itself across the West. If liberal democrats malign democracies every time they vote conservatively and lambast citizenries for being “anti-democratic,” eventually those citizenries will no longer care. The West just watched this happen in Afghanistan, and we would be foolish to imagine such a collapse could not happen elsewhere.

If democracy becomes a byword for “progressive politics,” then people across the West will not just reject liberalism—they will reject democracy too.

Anthony J. Constantini is writing his PhD on populism and early American democracy at the University of Vienna in Austria. Previously he received an MA in Arms Control and Strategic Studies from St. Petersburg State University in Russia. In 2016 he was the War Room Director for the NRSC. He currently resides in Vienna.

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