The second-largest accounting firm in the U.S. decided to revamp its hiring policies rather than face class-action lawsuits or an investigation by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. This is just the latest example of a private-sector company adjusting in response to the Supreme Court ruling against Harvard University last year.
PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), one of the vaunted Big 4 accounting firms, is eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) targets for its internship and scholarship programs. The company will also drop a commitment to earmark at least 40% of its procurement budget toward minority-owned suppliers.
America First Legal (AFL) sent a cease-and-desist letter to PwC in recent weeks warning of future litigation against it unless it ended its racial quotas. AFL described PwC as “one of the worst offenders when it comes to implementing racially discriminatory practices.”
Changes at PwC will include “ending race-based eligibility criteria for a student internship program and for scholarships to help candidates prepare for professional accounting exams, two initiatives that were designed to increase the diversity of the firm’s employee base,” according to the Financial Times. PwC reported it hired 3,500 people in fiscal year (FY) 2023, of whom “56% were racially/ethnically diverse.”
The percentage of white new hires at PwC dropped from 58% in FY 2021 to 51% in 2023. Many students say the costs of going to college and sitting for the certified public accountant exam are too high, leading to an exodus from the profession.
When the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police set off a wave of racial unrest across the country in 2020, corporate America responded swiftly with renewed and public commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).
Major companies created new DEI positions or expanded teams dedicated to DEI and the phrase became a buzzword across the business landscape. Many corporate leaders pledged to hire more people of color, removed branding perceived to be racist and invested in historically Black colleges. At the time, the efforts were largely met with public support, amid a so-called “racial reckoning” that laid bare a slew of systemic inequities in American society, including the workplace.
But nearly four years later, the very public ousting of Harvard’s first Black woman president earlier this week has led to a new firestorm of debate about DEI efforts in corporate America and beyond.
While Claudine Gay’s resignation from Harvard was linked to a plagiarism scandal and ongoing controversy over a congressional hearing on antisemitism last month, her departure inspired some critics to take aim at what they perceive as a broader failing of DEI efforts.
Among the most vocal of these critics pushing back against DEI is billionaire investor Bill Ackman, who in the wake of Gay’s departure posted a 4,000-word opus on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, that blasted DEI as “inherently a racist and illegal movement in its implementation even if it purports to work on behalf of the so-called oppressed.”
Ackman’s lengthy thesis was later retweeted by billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who now owns the social media platform.
“DEI is just another word for racism. Shame on anyone who uses it,” Musk wrote in his post sharing Ackman’s screed on Wednesday. In a follow-up post, the world’s wealthiest person doubled down, adding,
“DEI, because it discriminates on the basis of race, gender and
many other factors, is not merely immoral, it is also illegal.”
A pendulum swing
After a DEI hiring spree that began in late 2020, data suggests some businesses are now in fact reversing course on their efforts.
The most recent data on hiring from the job site Indeed shared with CNN Friday illustrates a pendulum swing in postings for DEI-related roles on the site.
After a more than 29% uptick in job postings with DEI in the title or description between November 2020 and November 2021, the data shows a more than 23% decline in the amount of job postings with “DEI” in the title or description between November 2022 and November 2023.
The Tide is Turning Away from Woke Activism in Business
The Corporate Equality Index (CEI) is America’s premiere benchmarking tool used to measure companies’ adherence to LBGT orthodoxy. An initiative of the misleadingly named Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the CEI has recently published its 2023 report—and the news is less-than-glittery for hundreds of corporations that have lost their perfect score since 2022.
In 2022, the number of companies to achieve a perfect score was 842.
In 2023, only 545 made the cut: a drop of 297 businesses in just 12 months.
Incredibly, among the companies to lose the prized badge were also those to suffer the most self-inflicted damage through 2023 woke overreach. These companies included Target and Bud Light’s parent company Anheuser-Busch, which slid 5 and 30 points respectively on CEI’s 100-point scale.
If you ever wanted proof that no amount of pandering will ever please our culture’s self-appointed moral overlords, here it is. CVS, United Airlines, BP, and Hewlett Packard all likewise lost their perfect scores in 2023 for failing to provide enough LGBT training, incentives, or “outreach.”
In fact, over half of the brands that had been ranked on the index previously
achieved a lower score in 2023—and among them were 85 Fortune 500 companies.
President of the 1792 Exchange (an organization opposing left-wing bias in corporate America) Paul Fitzpatrick was optimistic about the 2023 CEI results, as reported by The Washington Stand:
It’s good to see 300 fewer companies bending the knee to this controversial, activist organization. But public companies cannot fulfill their duty to their shareholders while allowing HRC to dictate their operations, messaging, policy engagement, and charitable giving. HRC’s annually escalating manipulation and extortion must be rejected. It’s time for businesses to get back to business.
Over the last several years, dozens of dubious climate change lawsuits have
been brought by state and local governments against the oil and gas industry.
They are bringing these cases with help from white-shoe law firms,
funded by non-profit money from Big Philanthropy.
Such attempts at “legislation through litigation” represent yet another example of the deeply regrettable tendency toward the ends-justify-the-means rationalizations common in contemporary political activism. The millions in tax-exempt philanthropic dollars apparently underwriting this lawsuit campaign also raise serious questions about the proper relationship between charity, politics and the judicial system.
Citing recently released tax filings, Fox News reported that theNew Venture Fund, a registered 501(c)(3) charity and the largest constituent member of the giant left-of-center political nonprofit network managed by Arabella Advisors, had granted $2.5 million to the for-profit law firm Sher Edling in 2022. This was after it had funneled $3 million to the firm last year.
Sher Edling is best known for representing state and local governments in a slew of lawsuits against oil and gas companies, accusing them of downplaying or otherwise misrepresenting the impact that their products have on the global climate. The governmental plaintiffs (which include the states of Rhode Island and Delaware, the cities of Charleston, South Carolina and Baltimore, the county of Anne Arundel, Maryland, and others) are suing to force “Big Oil” to pay them compensation for the vast costs that these governments claim they are incurring due to climate change.
None of the plaintiffs have yet prevailed on the merits,
but the catch is they don’t necessarily need to.
Activists hope that if just one case lands before “one judge in one state in one courtroom that sees a path to allowing these cases to go to trial,” discovery and the prospect of a jury trial could give them major leverage over the industry. The activists don’t necessarily need to win a verdict to achieve their ultimate objectives pertaining to future climate policy or legislation.
The money Sher Edling received from the New Venture Fund was apparently routed through one of the nonprofit’s countless fiscally-sponsored projects: the Collective Action Fund for Accountability, Resilience, and Adaptation. It has no website or other public profile, but grant descriptions explain that the fund’s purpose is to funnel charitable dollars to “enable cities, counties, and states hard hit by climate change to file high-impact climate damage and deception lawsuits represented by expert counsel.” This was formerly a project of a different 501(c)(3) called the Resources Legacy Fund, before switching its sponsorship to the New Venture Fund.
Notably, the Collective Action Fund has received
significant support from Big Philanthropy.
In an October 2023 letter responding to congressional inquiries, Sher Edling claimed that this philanthropic money does not underwrite specific lawsuits, but is instead used to support “the firm’s general operations in this area” — that is, climate litigation.
Because it would bypass the legislative process on a major issue of public policy, commentators have aptly labeled this whole phenomenon “legislation through litigation,” or even “lawfare.” They have raised important questions that more people should be asking. At least two overarching issues deserve particular mention.
The first concerns the nature of the lawsuits themselves. Climate change (and what should be done about it) is among the most contentious and consequential public policy issues of our time. The debate surrounding it involves major uncertainties and tradeoffs that carry with them direct personal ramifications for virtually every American. It is exactly the sort of issue that should be resolved though the political process, by voters and their elected representatives in Congress, not through a judicial process, by private lawyers and their ideologically motivated funders.
Moreover, it defies any notion of justice to hold the oil and gas industry civilly liable for producing and selling a product that is utterly essential to humanity’s survival — including these governmental plaintiffs’ own constituents. That is essentially what these lawsuits boil down to.
The second concern relates to the manner in which this litigation is evidently being at least partially financed. Big Philanthropy is routing millions of charitable dollars through a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofit to a for-profit law firm, for the purpose of supporting a nationwide litigation campaign. Is there a point at which such an arrangement ceases to be “charitable,” in the sense that we collectively understand that term? If so, what should we do about that?
Government lawsuits against the oil and gas industry over the alleged impacts of climate change rest upon an entirely unjust theory of liability. They are an affront to both the civil justice system and the democratic legislative process.
That they are apparently being underwritten by giant private foundations is further evidence of just how far Big Philanthropy has moved away from what most Americans would consider “charity.”
The Federal Court has ruled the Trudeau government’s decision to invoke the Emergencies Act during the so-called “Freedom Convoy” that descended on Ottawa in 2022 violated the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
In his ruling, Justice Richard G. Mosley said the move was “unreasonable” and outside the scope of the law. Mosley is a 21-year veteran of the Federal Court and is a respected voice on national security legal matters. He has weighed in on some of the most high-profile recent cases in Canadian intelligence, including a 2016 decision that found CSIS had been illegally storing Canadians’ communication data for more than a decade.
The case was brought forward by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA), the Canadian Constitution Foundation, Canadian Frontline Nurses and a handful of individuals.
Mosley wrote, “I have concluded that the decision to issue the Proclamation does not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness — justification, transparency and intelligibility — and was not justified in relation to the relevant factual and legal constraints that were required to be taken into consideration.”
“I think it’s in the interest of this government and future governments and all Canadians that the threshold to invoke the Emergencies Act remains high and that it is truly, as Justice Mosley says, a legislation of last resort,” CCLA lawyer Ewa Krajewska told Global News.
Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland says that Ottawa will appeal the ruling. “We respect very much Canada’s independent judiciary, however we do not agree with this decision, and respectfully we will be appealing it,” Freeland said at the cabinet retreat in Montreal.
Yes, that’s Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister, Chrystia Freeland calling for imposing unfathomable costs on Canadians to solve an imaginary problem (Climate Change). She also serves on WEF Board of Trustees.
‘The decision follows an application for judicial review launched by the Canadian Constitution Foundation, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, and several other applicants in 2022 after the emergency measures were used to end the Freedom Convoy protests in Ottawa. The measures controversially allowed the government to freeze the bank accounts of protesters, conscript tow truck drivers, and arrest people for participating in assemblies the government deemed illegal.”
“Yes, what was happening in Coutts may have been concerning, but [Mosley] finds that the existing laws of Canada were sufficient to deal with what was happening in Coutts and elsewhere in the country, and that is what the government was not able to demonstrate,” Krajewska said.
The ruling includes a secret February 2022 memo from the Privy Council Office (PCO), the central government department that supports the prime minister, recommending Trudeau invoke emergency powers. The document, which was partially censored and marked “cabinet confidence” – some of the most sensitive information in the federal government – noted that PCO believed the “examples of evidence to date” support the conclusion that the Emergencies Act was required. Although from the outset, PCO noted their conclusion could be challenged.
Krajewska tells Global News that the document was first produced during POEC, and the CCLA had it submitted to the court during this case. “I think it’s very important from a democracy and transparency perspective that the government produced this document during POEC and that it’s now been appended to this decision,” Krajewska said. “It’s important for Canadians to understand how the decision was made and what information the government had before it when it was making this decision.”
The document is a remarkable window into the advice Trudeau was getting from the public service during the crisis. Cabinet documents are very rarely released, and even the censored version contained some revelations.
For instance, it shows PCO was in active talks with the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF)
about how the military might assist in ending the protests should they be required.
The PCO memo revealed on Tuesday also notes that while Premier Doug Ford was an enthusiastic supporter of Trudeau invoking emergency powers, other premiers were more skeptical.
“A large number of other premiers expressed concern about the need to act carefully to avoid enflaming the underlying sentiment they considered to lie behind the protest, which they linked to public health measures including vaccine mandates,” the document read. “These premiers were not seeing the local manifestations of this movement yet in their jurisdiction.”
Quebec Premier François Legault “had a strong negative reaction to the proposal, saying that he would oppose the application of federal emergency legislation in Quebec,” where the memory of Trudeau’s father invoking the War Measures Act during the FLQ crisis is still alive.
Will Trudeau Finally Pay a Political Price for His Bad Governance? We certainly hope so.
BREAKING: Judge rules Trudeau broke the highest law in the land with the Emergencies Act.
He caused the crisis by dividing people. Then he violated Charter rights to illegally suppress citizens. As PM, I will unite our country for freedom.
When the World Economic Forum’s conference in Davos wrapped up
it was clear the Davos men were outflanked by the Davos disrupters
By the time the World Economic Forum’s annual conference wrapped up on Friday, it was clear this was the year the Davos men were sidelined by the Davos disrupters.
At the vanguard of these disrupters was Javier Milei, the president of Argentina, whose special address to the conferencemixed dark warnings about the future of the West with optimistic celebrations of free market capitalism.
While Davos attendees gathered to hear panels about creating jobs, harnessing AI and revamping the economy to battle climate change, Milei made headlines with his warnings against “greater regulation which creates a downward spiral until we are all poor.” In his speech, Milei warned the world against creeping towards socialism, arguing that collectivism in any form was the root cause of the West’s problems. The Argentinian president finished his speech with an enthusiastic flourish. “Long live freedom, dammit!”
Core Theme for Davos 2024
The next day Mark Carney, the slick Canadian central banker, joined a panel on monetary policy and argued that his former colleagues deserved “very high marks” for their recent performance battling post-pandemic inflation. To the populist right, which has been resurgent in the West and has trained its ire on Davos in recent years, Carney’s must have seemed like the more eccentric argument.
Federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has boasted that he sniffed out the inflation problem in early 2022 well before the bankers and economists that Carney praised. Poilievre has also been withering in his criticism of current Bank of Canada governor Tiff Macklem, whom Poilievre has promised to fire if he gets the chance. And Poilievre is no fan of the World Economic Forum (WEF), or what his party refers to as “highfalutin trips” to its annual meeting, or its policies, which “do not align with those of hard-working Canadian families.”
For years, Carney has been trailed by rumours that he wants to succeed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as Liberal leader, which would set up a showdown with Poilievre. That would see Poilievre, among the new breed of Davos disrupters, facing off against the consummate Davos man.
And if a previous clash between the two men, at a virtual meeting of the finance committee in 2021, is any indication, it would be an ill-tempered contest. That committee meeting was a raucous affair that provoked no less than 10 points of order from other MPs. Poilievre accused Carney’s opposition to Canadian pipelines (while supporting investments in foreign pipelines in his role as as chairman of Brookfield Asset Management) as smacking of “the Davos elite at its worst.”
Although Poilievre has been accused of chasing conspiracy theories about the WEF, his criticism of Carney sounds more like the critique offered in 2004 by Samuel Huntington, the Harvard political scientist who popularized the term “Davos man.”
Poilievre describes Carney as a global elitist who sees the world as an economic playground and national loyalties as an encumbrance or, at best, an irrelevance. While most people have strong patriotic feelings, Huntington described a Davos manthat saw himself as “global citizen” and identified with the world as a whole, in contrast to most people, who describe warm patriotic feelings for their home country.
“Comprising fewer than four percent of the American people, these transnationalists have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite’s global operations,” wrote Huntington.
Things have changed in the two decades since Huntington wrote his paper about the Davos men. When the London School of Economics Business Review in 2022 analyzed piles of press releases by the World Economic Forum, it found that growth and economic development were falling out of style. Words like “global,” “international” and “world” were also becoming passé. Instead, the World Economic Forum was concerned with the “Earth’s finitude and fragility” and words like “pollution” and “nature” had quadrupled.
It’s this new version of Davos that leaders like Milei want to disrupt.
The Argentinian’s libertarianism may have some overlap with Davos ideas from 20 years ago, but he’s a hostile figure at a conference where the terms “diversity,” “ethnicity,” and “equality” have increased five-fold in six years, according to the LSE Business Review analysis.
In fact, the neoliberal ideas about global trade that Huntington heard at Davos in the early 2000s would probably find some sympathy with both Milei and Poilievre, who are fans of the free market American economist Milton Friedman. Both men have been, somewhat erroneously, compared to former U.S. president Donald Trump but, as long-time libertarians, they more closely resemble each other. Milei’s philosophy even drifts into anarcho-capitalism, a kind of concentrated libertarianism that even Friedman shied away from.
One thing Trump, Poilievre and Milei share, though, is a deep mistrust of the kind of ideas bandied about at Davos and the kind of people who traffic in them. Poilievre has vowed that if he becomes prime minister, his cabinet won’t be allowed to travel to the annual Davos conference, as ministers in the previous Conservative government did.
But given the media reaction to Milei’s performance, which evoked praise from conservative media and curiosity from the mainstream media, Poilievre might be kicking himself that he didn’t think to travel to Davos, to join in person with the new wave of Davos disrupters.
The 20th century called and it wants the word crisis back, the first half of the 20th century in particular. Back then crises were truly terrifying. Think two world wars that exterminated tens of millions of people, genocides of Jews and Armenians, global economic depression, tax rates that topped out at 90 percent, and so much more.
Looking for a Job During the Great Depression. Hulton Archive / Getty Images
Fast forward to the present, and on relatively a quiet day (of which there are thankfully many) one of the most commonly expressed fears on the left concerns global warming born of fossil-fuel consumption. Without presuming to comment on the science here, what a luxurious worry. Back before innovators connected oil to the automation of work formerly done by humans, to cars, and eventually machines capable of cooling and/or warming our homes, weather extremes rendered the indoors and outdoors equally dreadful.
It’s too easily forgotten that air conditioners weren’t a market good until the 1930s, and once on the market, they retailed from $10,000 to $50,000. Fear of excess warmth or cooling care of appliances was well in the future, and worry about outdoor temperatures a likely byproduct of technology that made the indoors so livable. Put another way, if you fear warming or cooling outdoors it’s likely because you suffer neither indoors.
What does the past say about the present? It first signals that worry is hardly a modern concept. There’s always something. In our case, the somethings that have us up at night would have been viewed as positively luxurious by people who had worries of the world war, mass genocide, and back-breaking work kind that didn’t afford a lot of learning of any type. This isn’t to dismiss what has so many up in arms today, but it is to say that our “crises” are truly modern, and a rather bullish effect of immense prosperity.
Up front, I’m strongly of the view that “crypto” or “private money” will soon enough replace the dollar, euro, yuan, pound, Swiss franc, and any other widely circulated exchange mediums. It’s all in my 2022 book, The Money Confusion: How Illiteracy About Currencies and Inflation Sets the Stage for the Crypto Revolution. I believe this will happen simply because no one buys, sells, borrows or lends money. In reality, all monetary transactions are exchanges of goods, services and labor for goods, services, and labor.
This being the case, it’s only logical that private money would replace government money given the historical tendency for governments to devalue their currencies. Devaluation robs individuals of all stripes of the fruits of their work by shrinking the amount of goods, services and labor that money can be exchanged for.
At present, the dollar is the world’s currency with it at least on one side of something like 90% of global transactions. The dollar liquefies global exchange because those who bring market goods for sale expect the dollar they exchange those goods for to command roughly equal resources in the marketplace.
Yet as Jason Les and Brian Morgenstern argue in a column published today at RealClearMarkets, “the U.S. dollar is an inflationary asset.” Their explicit point is that the dollar has historically declined in value. Measured in gold, they’re quite correct. While a dollar purchased 1/35th of a gold ounce in 1971, in 2024 a dollar purchases roughly 1/2050th of a gold ounce. Though trusted globally as the referee in the vast majority of transactions, the dollar has very real demerits.
The problem is that Bitcoin in no way improves on the dollar’s demerits.
If anything, it’s quite a bit more turbulent.
My source? Les and Morgenstern’s essay. They contend that “a dollar today is worth about 30 percent less than it was ten years ago. By contrast, a single Bitcoin is worth 5,000 percent more today than it was ten years ago.” Which is one reason why Bitcoin is the opposite of money.
In reality, money is quiet. Or should be. Good money is never talked about, nor are returns written about with glee. To see why, imagine asking me to come remodel the master bathroom at your house, only for me to ask for payment in Bitcoin. From there, I’ll ask for one coin up front, one in six months, and one at completion in a year. If the coin’s volatility and direction in 2024 mirrors its direction in 2023, you the buyer of my services will be hit excessively hard. Think about it. While the market price of Bitcoin at the moment is $42,000, six months ago it was $30,000, and one year ago it was $21,000.
To say that there are risks associated with Bitcoin-refereed transactions is quite the understatement. Les and Morgenstern explain why. In their words, “Bitcoin’s deflationary properties make it an effective long-term savings instrument.” Ok, but what recommends a “currency” as an asset doesn’t recommend that same currency as money. See above. At the same time, and as evidenced by Bitcoin’s price at the time of this write-up, the value of it is in no way an up, up, up concept.
Les and Morgenstern contend that Bitcoin is digital gold, except that it isn’t.
The simple truth about gold is that the yellow metal itself doesn’t move. Thanks to highly unique stock and flow qualities, gold is constant as a measure. That’s why markets happened on it as the definer of money par excellence over thousands of years. When gold moves in price, that’s the value of the dollar, euro, pound, yuan, or Swiss franc in which it’s being measured moving, not the metal itself.
All of which brings us to what is arguably Bitcoin’s biggest demerit: its circulation is finite. In the words of Les and Morgenstern, “21 million. That’s how many Bitcoin will ever exist. Ever. Period. End of story.” Well yes, but that’s the problem. There’s never too much good money simply because there can never be too much production, and the sole use of money is as a facilitator of the exchange of the fruits of production.
Circulation of good, trusted money is limitless yet there are strict limits
to Bitcoin. That’s why it can never be money. End of story
Argentina’s President Javier Milei had a warning for those attending the annual WEF meeting in Davos, Switzerland; ‘the Western world is in danger’ from ‘collectivist experiments’ such as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), and has called on the world to reject socialism and instead embrace “free enterprise capitalism” to end global poverty. H/T zerohedge
“Today, I’m here to tell you that the Western world is in danger,” Milei toild the audience. “And it is in danger because those who are supposed to defend the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inexorably leads to socialism, and thereby to poverty,” he added.
The self-described “anarcho-capitalist” criticized Davos itself for its “socialist agenda, which will only bring misery to the world,” according to Reuters.
“The main leaders of the Western world have abandoned the model of freedom for different versions of what we call collectivism. We’re here to tell you that collectivist experiments are never the solution to the problems that afflict the citizens of the world — rather they are the root cause,” Milei said, adding “Do believe me, no-one [is] better placed than us Argentines to testify to these two points.”
Below is a lightly edited transcript of Milei’s speech from the closed captions. In the video the talking only begins at 4.25 minutes with Schwab’s introduction. I added some images.
Schwab: Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen it’s for me a great great honor to welcome Javier Milei, as you know is a freely elected president of Argentina. And it’s actually your first trip to a foreign country after being elected. First congratulations for your election and congratulations also to your sister who managed your campaign. Sometimes people would say it was with more radical methods but you introduce a new spirit to Argentina, making Argentina much more related to free enterprise, to entrepreneurial activities, and also to bring Argentina back to the rule of law.
So we have a very extraordinary person among us today and of course we are all all eager to listen to you. Again a very cordial welcome to the World Economic Forum.
Javier Milei: Good afternoon. thank you very much today I’m here to tell you that the Western world is in danger. And it is endangered because those who are supposed to defend the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inexorably leads to socialism and thereby to poverty. Unfortunately in recent decades, motivated by some well-meaning individuals willing to help others, and others motivated by the wish to belong to a privileged cast, the main leaders of the western world have abandoned the model of freedom for different versions of what we call collectivism.
We’re here to tell you that collectivist experiments are never the solution to the problems that afflict the citizens of the world. Rather they are the root cause. Do believe me; no one is better placed than we Argentines to testify to these two points. When we adopted the model of Freedom back in 1860 in 35 years we became a leading world power. And when we embraced collectivism over the course of the last 100 years, we saw how our citizens started to become systematically impoverished. And we dropped to spot number 140 globally.
But before having that discussion it would first be important for us to take a look at the data that demonstrate why free enterprise capitalism is not just the only possible system to end world poverty, but also that it’s the only morally desirable system to achieve this. If we look at the history of economic progress we can see how between the year Zero and the year 1800 approximately world per capita GDP practically remained constant throughout the whole reference period. If you look at a graph of the evolution of economic growth throughout the history of humanity you would see a hockey stick graph. An exponential function that remained constant for 90% of the time and which was exponentially triggered starting in the 19th century.
The only exception to this history was in the late 15th century with the discovery of the American continent but for this exception throughout the whole period between the year zero and the year 1800 Global per capita GDP stagnated. It’s not just that capitalism brought about an explosion in wealth from the moment it was adopted as an economic system. But also if you look at the data you will see that growth continues to accelerate throughout the whole period. Between the year zero and the year 1800 the per capita GDP growth rate remained stable at around 0.02% annually so almost no growth. Starting in the 19th century with the Industrial Revolution the compound annual growth rate was 66% and at that rate in order to double per capita GDP you would need some 107 years.
Now if you look at the period between the year 1900 and the year 1950 the growth rate accelerated to 1.66% a year so you no longer need 107 years to double per capita GDP but 66. And if you take the period between 1950 and the year 2000 you will see that the growth rate was 2.1%, which would mean then in only 33 years we could double the world’s per capita GDP. Far from stopping, this trend remains well and alive today, For the period between the year 2000 and 2023 the growth rate again accelerated to 3% a year which means that we could double world per capita GDP in just 23 years.
That said when you look at per capita GDP since the year 1800 and until today you will see that after the Industrial Revolution Global per capita GDP multiplied by over 15 times, which meant a boom in growth that lifted 90% of the global population out of poverty. We should remember that by the year 1800 about 95% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty and that figure dropped to 5% by the year 2020 prior to the pandemic.
The conclusion is obvious. Far from being the cause of our problems free trade capitalism as an economic system is the only instrument we have to end hunger, poverty and extreme poverty. Across our planet the empirical evidence is unquestionable. Therefore since there is no doubt that free enterprise capitalism is Superior in productive terms the leftwing doxer has attacked capitalism alleging matters of morality. The detractors claim that it’s unjust; they say capitalism is evil because it’s individualistic and that collectivism is good because it’s altruistic. Of course with the money of others they advocate for social justice.
But this concept which became fashionable in the developed world in recent times, has been in my country a constant in political discourse for over 80 years. The problem is that social justice is not just and nor does it contribute either to the general well being. Quite on the contrary, it’s an intrinsically unfair idea because it’s violent. It’s unjust because the state is financed through tax and taxes are collected coercively. Can anyone of us say that they voluntarily pay taxes? Which means that the state is financed through coercion and that the higher the tax burden the higher the coercion and the lower the freedom.
Those who promote social justice, the Advocates start with the idea that the whole economy is a pie that can be shared differently. But that pie is not a given. It’s wealth that is generated in what Israel Kirzner for instance calls a market Discovery process. If the goods or services offered by a business are not wanted, the business will fail unless it adapts to what the market is demanding. If they make a good quality product at an attractive price they will do well and produce more. So the market is a discovery process in which the capitalist will find the right path as they move forward.
But if the state punishes capitalists when they’re successful and gets in the way of the discovery process, their incentives are destroyed. And the consequence is that they will produce less, the pie will be smaller and this will harm society as a whole. By inhibiting these Discovery processes and hindering the appropriation of discoveries, Collectivism ends up binding the hands of entrepreneurs and prevents them from offering better goods and services at a better price.
So how come that Academia, International organizations, economic theory and politics demonize an economic system that has not only lifted 90% of the world’s population out of extreme poverty but has continued to do this faster and faster? And this is morally Superior. Just thanks to free trade capitalism, the world is now living its best moment. Never in all of Humanity’s history has there been a time of more Prosperity than today. All the world of today has more freedom, is richer, is more peaceful and prosperous.
And this is particularly true for countries that have more freedom and have economic freedom and respect the property rights of individuals. Countries that have more freedom are 12 times richer than those that are repressed and the lowest decile in terms of distribution in free countries are better off than 90% of the population of repressed countries. And poverty is 25 times lower and extreme poverty is 50 times lower. And citizens in free countries live 25% longer than citizens in repressed countries.
Now what do we mean when we talk about libertarianism? Let me quote the words of the greatest Authority on freedom in Argentina Professor Alberto Benegas Lynch who says that libertarianism is the unrestricted respect for the life project of others based on the principle of non-aggression in defense of the right to life, liberty and property. Its fundamental institutions being private property, markets free from State intervention, free competition.
The division of labor and social cooperation as part of which success is achieved only by serving others with Goods of better quality or at a better price. In other words capitalists, successful business people are social benefactors who, far from appropriating the wealth of others, contribute to the general well-being. Ultimately a successful entrepreneur is a hero and this is the model that we are advocating for the Argentine of the future, a model based on the fundamental principles of libertarianism: the defense of Life, of freedom and of property.
Now if free enterprise capitalism and economic freedom have proven to be extraordinary instruments to end poverty in the world, and we are now at the best time in the history of humanity, why do I say that the West is in danger? I say this precisely because in those countries that should defend the values of the free market private property and the other institutions of libertarianism, sectors of the political and economic establishment, some due to mistakes in their theoretical framework and others due to a Greed for power, are undermining the foundations of libertarianism, opening up the doors to socialism and potentially condemning us to Poverty misery and stagnation.
It should never be forgotten that socialism is always and everywhere an impoverishing phenomenon that has failed in all countries where it’s been tried out. It’s been a failure economically, socially culturally and it also murdered over a 100 million human beings. The essential problem for the West today is not just that we need to come to grips with those who even after the fall of the Berlin wall and the overwhelming empirical evidence continue to advocate for impoverishing socialism. But there’s also our own leaders, thinkers and academics relying on a misguided theoretical framework, who undermine the fundamentals of the system that has given us the greatest expansion of life and prosperity in our history. I refer to the misguided neoclassical economic theory which designs a set of instruments that unwillingly or without intention ends up serving intervention by the state socialism and social degradation.
The problem is neoclassicals fell in love with a model that does not map reality. So they put down their mistakes to supposed market failures, rather than reviewing the premises of the model. On the pretext of a supposed market failure regulations are introduced which only create distortions in the price system, They prevent economic calculus and therefore also prevent saving, investment and growth. This problem lies mainly in the fact that not even supposedly libertarian economists understand what is the market. Because if they did understand, it would quickly be seen that it’s impossible for that to be something along the line of market failures.
The market is not a mere graph describing a curve of supply and demand. The market is a mechanism of social cooperation where you voluntarily exchange ownership rights. Therefore based on this definition, talking about a market failure is an oxymoron. There are no market failures if transactions are voluntary. There can only be a market failure if there is coercion. And generally the only one that is able to coerce is the state which holds a monopoly on violence.
Consequently if someone considers that there is a market failure I suggest they check to see if the state intervention was involved. And if they find that’s not the case, I would suggest that they check again. Because market failures do not exist. An example of so-called market failures described by the neoclassicals are the concentrated structures of the economy. However without increasing returns to scale functions whose counterpart are the concentrated structures of the economy, we couldn’t possibly explain economic growth since the year 1800 until today.
Isn’t this interesting that since the the year 1800 onwards with population multiplying by eight or nine times, per capita GDP grow by over 15 times. So there are growing returns which took extreme poverty from 95% to 5%. However the presence of growing returns um involves concentrated structures, what we would call a monopoly. How come then that something that has generated so much wellbeing the neoclassical theory calls a market failure?
Neoclassical economists, think outside of the box! When the model fails you shouldn’t get angry with reality, but rather with a model and change it. Those with the the neoclassical model face a dilemma. They say that they wish to perfect the functioning of the market by attacking what they consider to be failures, but in doing so they don’t just open up the doors to socialism but also go against economic growth. For example, regulating monopolies, destroying their profits and destroying growing returns automatically would destroy economic growth. In other words whenever you want to correct a supposed market failure as a result of not knowing what is the market, or as a result of having fallen in love with a failed model, you are opening up the doors to socialism and condemning people to Poverty.
However faced with the theoretical demonstration that state intervention is harmful and the empirical evidence that it has failed, the solution to be proposed by collectivists is not greater freedom but rather greater regulation which creates a downward spiral of regulations until we’re all poorer. And all of our lives depend on a bureaucrat sitting in a luxury office.
Given the dismal failure of collectivist models and the undeniable advances in the Free World, socialists were forced to change their agenda. They left behind the class struggle based on the economic system, and replaced this with other supposed social conflicts which are just as harmful to community life and to economic growth. The first of these new battles was the ridiculous and unnatural fight between man and woman. Libertarianism already provides for equality of these sexes. The Cornerstone of our creed says that all humans are created equal, that we all have the same unalienable rights granted by the Creator, including life, freedom and ownership. All that this radical feminism agenda has led to is greater State intervention to Hind the economic process giving a job to bureaucrats who have not contributed anything to society. Examples include ministries of women or International organizations devoted to promoting this agenda.
Another conflict presented by socialists is that of humans against nature, claiming that we human beings damage the planet which should be protected at all costs, even going as far as advocating for population control mechanisms or the bloody abortion agenda. Unfortunately these harmful ideas have taken a strong hold in our society. Neo-Marxists have managed to co-opt the common sense of the western world, and this they have achieved by appropriating the media, culture, universities and also International organizations. The latter case is the most serious one probably, because these are institutions that have enormous influence on political and economic decisions of the countries that make up the multilateral organizations.
Fortunately there’s more and more of us who are daring to make our voices heard because we see that if we don’t truly and decisively fight against these ideas, the only possible fate is for us to have increasing levels of State regulation, socialism, poverty and less freedom. And therefore we will be having worse standards of living. The West has unfortunately already started to go along this path.
To many it may sound ridiculous to suggest that the West has turned to socialism but it’s only ridiculous if you only limit yourself to the traditional economic definition of socialism which says that it’s an economic system where the state owns the means of production. This definition in my view should be updated in the light of current circumstances. Today states don’t need to directly control the means of production to control every aspect of the lives of individuals. With tools such as printing money debt, subsidies controlling the interest rate, price controls and regulations to correct the so-called market failures they can control the lives and fates of millions of individuals.
This is how we come to the point where by using different names or guises a good deal of the generally accepted political officers in most Western countries are collectivist variants, whether they proclaim to be openly communist, fascist, Nazis, socialists, social Democrats, National socialists, Democrat Christians or Christian democrats. Whether Progressive populist nationalists or globalists, at bottom there are no major differences. They all say that the state should steer all aspects of the lives of individuals. they all defend a model contrary to that one which led Humanity to the most spectacular progress in our history.
We have come here today to invite the rest of the countries in the Western World to get back on the path of prosperity, economic freedom, limited government and unlimited respect for private property. These are essential elements for economic growth. Tthe impoverishment produced by collectivism is no fantasy nor is it an inescapable fate, but it’s a reality that we Argentines know very well. We have lived through this; we have been through this ever since we decided to abandon the model of Freedom that had made us rich. We have been caught up in the downward spiral as part of which we are poorer and poorer day by day.
So this is something we have lived through and we are here to warn you about what can happen if the countries in the western world that became Rich through the model of Freedom stay on this path of servitude. The case of Argentina is an empirical demonstration that no matter how rich you may be or how much you may have in terms of Natural Resources or how skilled your population may be or educated or how many bars of gold you may have in the central bank, if measures are adopted that hinder the free functioning of markets, free competition, free Price system, If You Hinder trade if you attack private property, the only possible fate is poverty.
Therefore in concluding I would like to leave a message for all business people here and for those who are not here in person but are following from around the world. Do not be intimidated either by the political cast or by parasites who live off the state. Do not surrender to political class that only wants to stay power and retain its privileges. You are social benefactors, you’re Heroes, you’re the creators of the most extraordinary period of prosperity we’ve ever seen. Let no one tell you that your ambition is immoral. If you make money it’s because you offer a better product at a better price thereby contributing to General well being.
Do not surrender to the advance of the state. The state is not the solution, the state is itself the problem. You are the true protagonists of this story and rest assured that from today on Argentina is your unconditional Ally. Thank you very much and Long Live Freedom.
There are signs that cancel culture is in decline and it’s possible
to say things again that everyone knows to be true.
The year just beginning could be a watershed, with turning points in politics, economics and culture, provided common sense and moral clarity prevail both here and abroad.
Two regional wars in Ukraine and Gaza could spread and provoke a direct confrontation between western democracies and Russia, Iran and China. Equivocation or faltering support for embattled allies would weaken the democracies in their struggle with aggressive autocratic foes who harbour malign territorial and ideological/theocratic ambitions. If Vladimir Putin manages to keep Ukrainian land seized by force of arms, he will be less concerned about NATO’s reaction should he invade other countries the Soviet Union once subjugated. Unless Israel destroys Hamas, that group’s genocidal savagery will never end and peace in the Middle East will remain just a dream.
As the world became more dangerous and unstable in 2023,
Canada chose to undermine its own international standing.
To sit at the adult table requires a moral compass, which means opposing anti-Israel votes in the UN and designating Iran’s Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization, which we failed to do. It also means not being a military free-rider. Our decision to act instead as a “convener” and self- important virtue-signaller irritates allies who must shoulder our share of the burden and third-world countries who see our posturing as post-colonial arrogance.
The American elections in November could be transformative. Canada’s Liberals will face a rude awakening if a triple Republican victory brings to power politicians with whom they have little contact and even less influence. It’s to be hoped they are reaching out discreetly.
On the policy front, the World Economic Forum (WEF) continues to try to influence global governmental, industrial and social agendas. Its “Great Reset” envisages an intrusive public sector in thrall to climate catastrophism that would reduce personal agency through pervasive oversight mechanisms, including central bank digital currencies. Forum chairman Klaus Schwab assured elite Davos attendees that “The future belongs to us” — comforting words for those jealous of their influence and accustomed to ignoring rules that apply to the hoi polloi. Chrystia Freeland and Mark Carney are on the WEF board of trustees and the Justin Trudeau’s Liberal party certainly reflects its centre-left technocratic view.
But European governments are moving away from costly climate initiatives
and support for EVs in response to public opposition. The U.S. will follow suit
if Donald Trump wins back the presidency.
Canadians resent seemingly endless woke policies that defy common sense but only occasionally demonstrate against them, usually saving their outrage for the ballot box. A recent example of ludicrous groupthink was the unanimous decision of Toronto City Council to change the name of Yonge-Dundas Square to Sankofa Square. It cancelled Henry Dundas, a committed British abolitionist, in favour of a Ghanaian name originating with the Akan people, who were themselves slave traders — all this in the name of “racial justice and equality.” In another instance of feel-good inanity, though one that may have harmful consequences, 34 Ontario municipal councils passed resolutions to phase out natural gas power, which is unachievable without electricity blackouts and crushing cost. Subsequently, Windsor city council acknowledged reality and approved plans for two new gas turbines to assure reliable electricity.
On the economic front, Canadians’ personal prosperity, as measured by GDP per capita, is projected to decline this year by more than two per cent. To address affordability and dismal long-term productivity, the federal government needs to shift focus from identity politics and climate obsession to economic growth, fiscal responsibility and raising Canadians’ standard of living. In addition to recommendations I outlined in my last column, we need to pursue academic excellence, colour-blind hiring based on competence and achievement — remember those quaint concepts? — and a return to shareholder capitalism away from stakeholder capitalism, which eats away at free enterprise, the source of our collective prosperity.
Although billions of people around the world would love to settle in the Great White North, progressive elites’ guilt about their own privileged lifestyle does not justify the massive influx of immigrants that is currently disadvantaging hardworking Canadians and exacerbating an already severe housing crisis.
Most Canadians understand that, and in 2023 it became possible
to make such arguments without being cancelled.
Whether antisemitic hate crimes and violence will spread even more in 2024 remains an open question. The late chief rabbi of the U.K., Jonathan Sacks drew on history to tell people that “The hate that begins with the Jews, never ends with the Jews.” This ancient social pathology has broad implications for Canadian society and needs to be dealt with, urgently and decisively, by every level of government. After an initially slow response, there seems to be growing recognition of that.
There were also glimmers of good news on the higher education front. The U.S. Supreme Court declared affirmative action in college admissions unconstitutional. And the resignation of Harvard president Claudine Gay exposed the intellectual rot in American universities. Now, a crucial battle against institutionally entrenched interests has started, aiming to abolish “diversity, equity and inclusion,” a divisive, essentially racist ideology that undermines excellence, integrity and productivity in academia and the workplace. That battle has not really begun yet in Canada.
If these and other issues become constructive turning points,
2024 could be a better year than its dark predecessor.
Robert Malone writes at Brownstone Institute ‘Science’ in Service of the Agenda. Excerpts in itallics with my bolds. H/T Tyler Durden
We all know what climate change is. The truth is that the UN, most globalists, and a wide range of world leaders” blame human activities for climate change.Whether or not climate change is real or that human activities are enhancing climate change is not important to this discussion. That is a subject for another day. [That subject is pursued here GHG Theory and the Tests It Fails.]
Most climate change scientists receive funding from the government. So they must comply with the government edict and policy position that human activity-caused climate change is an existential threat to both humankind and global ecosystems. When these “scientists” publish studies supporting the thesis that human activities cause climate change, they are more likely to receive more grant monies and therefore more publications and therefore are more likely to be academically promoted (or at least to survive in the dog-eat-dog world of modern academe).
Those who produce a counternarrative from the government-approved one soon find themselves without funding, tenure, without jobs, unable to publish and unable to procure additional grants and contracts. It is a dead-end career wise. The system has been rigged.
And by the way, this is nothing new. Back in the day, during the war on drugs, if a researcher who had funding by the NIH’s NIDA (National Institute of Drug Addiction)published an article or wrote an annual NIH grant report showing benefits to using recreational drugs, that would be a career-ending move, as funding would not be renewed and new funding would never materialize. . . The administrative state at NIH does that! And anything that went against the war on drugs was considered a war on the government. Funding denied.
The new wrinkle in what has now happened with corrupted climate change activism/ propaganda/ ”science” is that the manipulation of research is crossing disciplines. No longer satisfied with oppressing climate change scientists, climate change narrative enforcers have moved into the nutritional sciences. This trend of crossing disciplines portends death for the overall independence of any scientific endeavors. A creeping corruption into adjacent disciplines. Because climate change activists, world leaders, research institutions, universities, and governments are distorting another branch of science outside of climate science. They are using the bio-sciences, specifically nutrition science, to support the climate change agenda. It is another whole-of-government response to the crisis, just like with Covid-19.
They are distorting health research to make the case that eating meat is
dangerous to humans. Normal standards for publication have been set aside.
The propaganda is thick and easily spotted.
As the NIH is now funding researchers to find associations between climate change and health, it is pretty clear that those whose research is set up to find such associations will be funded. Hence, once again, the system is rigged to support the climate change narrative.
Some Recent “Peer Reviewed” Academic Publications on Climate Change and Diet:
Enter climate change regulations, laws, and goals – such as those found in UN Agenda 2030.Enter globalists determined to buy up farmland to control prices, agriculture, and eating trends. Enter politics into our food supplies and even the science of nutrition What a mess.
The climate crisis is one of the leading causes of the steep rise in global hunger. Climate shocks destroy lives, crops and livelihoods, and undermine people’s ability to feed themselves. Hunger will spiral out of control if the world fails to take immediate climate action.
Note that “Climate shocks” have always existed and will always exist. The existence of readily observed (and easily propagandized) human tragedies associated with hurricanes, fires, and droughts are embedded throughout the entire archaeological record of human existence. This is nothing new in either written human history or prehistory. This does not equate to a pressing existential human crisis.
In fact, reviewing the evidence of calories and protein available reveals a very different trend. Over time, per capita caloric and protein supplies have increased almost across the board. Despite clear and compelling evidence that climate change is not impacting on food availability or undernutrition, websites, news stories, and research literature all make tenuous assertions about how the climate change “crisis” is causing starvation.
This is not to say that that the poorest nations in the world don’t have issues with famine; they do. It is an issue, but not a climate change issue. It is a gross distortion of available data and any objective scientific analysis of those data to assert otherwise.
The best way to stop famine is to ensure that countries have adequate energy
and resources to grow their own food supply, and have a domestic
manufacturing base. That means independent energy sources.
If the United Nations and the wealthy globalists at the WEF truly want to help nations with high poverty and famine rates and reduce our immigration pressure, they would help them secure stable energy sources. They would help them develop their natural gas and other hydrocarbon projects. Then they could truly feed themselves. They could attain independence.
Famine is not a climate change issue; it is an energy issue.
Apples and oranges. This is not “scientific.” Rather, it is yet more weaponized fear porn being used as a Trojan horse to advance hidden political and economic objectives and agendas of political movements, large corporations, and non-governmental organizations. Facts matter.
In chemistry, a litmus test is a strip of paper that turns red or blue when dipped into a liquid. Red shows the liquid is acid, while blue shows it is alkaline. The analogy in this context: Being able to openly discuss and challenge climate claims shows how healthy or toxic is the discourse in an institution or social circle.
The difference between toxic and healthy discussion spaces is indicated by this quote from eminent physicist Richard Feynman:.
Dr. Matthew Wielicki shares his personal experiences with these spaces in a brief video. I provide a transcript from the closed captions lightly edited for reading. He explains how being able to freely discuss and debate climate claims signals an air of social freedom, in the absence of which living things die like canaries in coal mines. Text is in italics with my bolds and added images.
[An Aside: Soviet Humor:
Q: What is the difference between the Constitutions of the US and USSR? Both of them guarantee freedom of speech.
A: Yes, but the USA Constitution also guarantees freedom after the speech. (Passé?)]
Climate change is tricky.There’s a disconnect between what
the science says and what is the narrative in the mainstream media.
My name is Matthew Wielicki and this is my story. I am a former faculty member in the department of geological Sciences at the University of Alabama. I have a doctorate in Geology and Earth Science and I am the author of Irrational Fear substack. I was born in southern Poland at a time when Poland was under the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union and a communist government. And my parents made the decision to immigrate to Chicago, like all good Polish people do; that’s the Ellis Island for Polish people of Chicago.
Then eventually I grew up in Fresno California where we received political Asylum and eventually citizenship. I grew up on a college campus Cal State University Fresno. My father was a faculty member there at the school of business, my mother was in information technology and staff. I would ride my scooter around campus after school every day. It was something that I fell in love with. It was a place where there were these Warriors that battled in the playing field of ideas, and then they would go and have dinner together. And they would chat and be friendly, so it was this beautiful place of just intellectual discussion.
So I pretty much decided I was going to be an academic when I was 10 or 12. I was always intrigued by science. My original degrees were biochemistry and cellular biology. I was what was called a geochronologist: Geo being Rock, chronology being kind of the ages. I received my PhD from the Department of Earth Planetary and Space Sciences at UCLA. Then I was offered a 10 year track position at the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Alabama. Taking that faculty position in Alabama was my dream, and so I was absolutely excited. I was a little nervous moving our family from California to Alabama. That’s a pretty big move but you know we were excited.
It was definitely something I wanted to do but I noticed that the campus that I grew up on and the one that my father and I would talk about was different. College campuses have always been meritocracies, we have GPA, we give grades. Now there was a shift from performance and ability to what I would say are immutable characteristics; meaning what you look like, or maybe your background or your race. And those are things that students don’t have any control over.
And so there was this disconnect from what I remembered, where it was this competition of ideas and everybody was on an equal playing field. And if your idea was better than your competitor’s idea, then your ideas would win. Bnd now it seemed that the ideas didn’t matter as much as characteristics of the students to appease funding agencies or whatever it was. One of the first things was theygot rid of the GRE: this is The Graduate Requirement Exam. so in the name of equity they removed an entrance exam, and so I was now left with trying to understand someone’s life story from an essay without having any standardized metric to compare them to.
So I would bring this up in faculty meetings and it was clear
that they were checking a box. There were certain things
that we couldn’t discuss in Academia.
In Earth Sciences if you speak about climate change that is one of these taboo subjects. And climate change is tricky: there’s a disconnect between what the science says and what is the narrative in the mainstream media. What I would call activist scientists have been kind of pushing the narrative in the media which is doing so much damage to mental health. Climate anxiety is probably the number one anxiety issue for the college students that I talk to. And the science does not support that fear.
I think that fear is irrational, climate is a very convenient way for governments and institutions to get involved in nearly every aspect of a citizen’s life. And if you are basing your life decisions, like whether or not to have children, whether or not to raise a family, whether or not to make sacrifices today such that maybe in a decade or so you’re going to be in a better position. If you think that the planet is going to end, you don’t make those sacrifices.
I definitely love the Earth and humans have an influence on the climate and on their environment. And we should minimize that but the notion that our policy changes today will have some dramatic impact on future temperatures or weather in general is untrue. But if you speak out against it, you’re essentially a pariah in this community.
In my introductory geology class, I gave a a two-day lecture about climate realism as what I called it. The students were were were amazingly refreshed to hear that the planet wasn’t going to end in 10 or 12 years but faculty members were a little uncomfortable with it. If you push out scientists that disagree with your narrative, this isn’t an open discussion. This isn’t about finding the truth but rather silencing those that disagree with you, so that you can continue to push your narrative.
I started to publish a little bit more on social media, and the moment that those stories gained any traction, faculty members in the University of Alabama were making posts that I was was committing violence, that I was putting their jobs and their safety in Jeopardy because I was asking questions. So I decided to leave during Covid. It just wasn’t that dream job that I had been thinking about my entire life. It wasn’t this beautiful place of exchanging ideas that I wanted it to be. I don’t think I would have been able to stay if I chose to stay. I doubt that I would have been awarded tenure if I chose to stay because I had been so vocal.
The data is very clear: there is no metric that we can call the current state of the climate a crisis or an emergency or a breakdown. They’re trying to elicit fear. When people are afraid they are most vulnerable to changing their behaviors. I grew up in a household that was very aware of some of the mistakes of a communist type of government: centralized planning and the removal of the free exchange of ideas.
That makes me more vocal because I see that we’re making the same mistakes that my parents always told me we should never go down this road. It’s the lack of tolerance for ideas, what I call illiberalism; the idea that if you question certain aspects of the government or certain ideologies that you are no longer a good citizen. But if you haven’t lived it you don’t know that these are mistakes. Science is supposed to be about the discovery of the truth and the most important aspect of that is the ability to discuss. I want young people to be hopeful for their future. We should realize that there’s going to be challenges; climate will change but that shouldn’t be a reason to think that your future isn’t hopeful.
Messaging to Make Anxious Children (Example by Canada Federal Government)
What are Dissenting Scientists Saying (Clintel example)
Climate Crisis = Big Government (Example by Canada Federal Government)
These short videos from Trudeau Govt. are airing often on all TV channels and paid for by taxpayers. And yet the last time Canadians were honestly asked about Global Warming, here’s how they responded (buried in the appendices of the survey report).
Yes, the map shows I am living in a hotbed of global warming believers around Montreal; well, it is 55%, as high as it gets in Canada. So Trudeau is not listening to more than half of Canadians, but instead using their money to promote his own WEF inspired agenda to change their minds.
Wielicki is warning about a governmental takeover
that is far advanced in North America.
Global News reports 
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Robert Malone writes at Brownstone Institute ‘Science’ in Service of the Agenda. Excerpts in itallics with my bolds. H/T Tyler Durden
If the United Nations and the wealthy globalists at the WEF truly want to help nations with high poverty and famine rates and reduce our immigration pressure, they would help them secure stable energy sources. They would help them develop their natural gas and other hydrocarbon projects. Then they could truly feed themselves. They could attain independence.
Science Matters 