Environmentalists have captured the Democratic party and, in their push towards Net Zero, are aiding Russia and China, a senior fellow at RealClearFoundation, Rupert Darwall, says.
Furthermore, the push towards Net Zero has monopolized “the money,” as the group includes many Silicon Valley billionaires, intellectuals, and the mainstream media, Darwall told The Epoch Times and NTD’s Paul Greaney in an interview.
In the interview, which aired on NTD’s Fresh Look America on Oct. 12, Darwall said a prime example of environmentalists taking over the Democratic party, and monopolizing the money, is California.
There, billionaire environmentalists have instituted “an aggressive green agenda” that doesn’t negatively impact them but directly opposes the average California voters’ interests, he said.
“Voters, and particularly in the Central Valley, who endure stifling temperatures in summer, had to pay ruthlessly high prices to condition their homes. They don’t have beachfront properties that are cooled from the Pacific.”
Darwall added that because California is “essentially a one-party state,” voters can’t correct the “extreme environmental policies.” Plus, environmentalists use a version of McCarthyism to stifle opposition.
In the 1950s, U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy accused thousands of innocent people and parties of disloyalty and allowing Communism to influence their lives and policies.
Darwall said environmentalists today use a similar tactic when they label anyone who disagrees with them as a “climate denier.”
“They know ‘denier’ is a very powerful term to be called. You may have seen a New York Times journalist interviewing the president of World Bank, and [the journalist asks] “are you a climate denier?’ It’s designed to chill debate. Not just chill it but prevent people questioning.”
[ Tip: Q: Aren’t you a climate denier? A: I am a climate thinker. ]
Green Imperialism
If this progression towards Net Zero continues, Darwall said he knew who will win.
“China and Russia. I mean, basically, the opponents of the West, geopolitically from stepping back, but they’re the big winners from the West deciding to bring itself to its knees. I mean, no modern economy can function without cheap, abundant energy and fossil fuel derived energy.”
“We’re basically cutting off our legs. The pain will increase. People are blaming Putin for the terrible winter the Europeans are going to experience this this year. But the way I would put it is Net Zero is Vladimir Putin’s best ally.”
Darwall further added that not only is the West hurting itself and helping Putin, but it’s also engaging in a sort of “green imperialism.”
As mentioned above, the president of the World Bank had been attacked, specifically by Al Gore, Darwall said, because the World Bank was one of the “big providers of finance to Africa.”
“There are over a billion Africans, and they are energy starved. Africa is an energy-starved continent. And the effect of Western green policies is to freeze, as it were, African Development at a very low level.”
Darwall continued, “Grid-delivered electricity is the doorway to the modern world. If you compare the 19th century to the 20th century, the big change is electricity.
“For Africa to flourish and develop, it needs reliable, cheap, grid-delivered electricity. And that is what people like Al Gore and John Kerry are denying Africans.”
Darwall specified that people like Kerry and Gore are pursuing an agenda that geologically damages the West, its strategic interest, and the economic and social interests of less developed nations.
Political Reckoning
As a result, Darwall believed a political reckoning is coming to the West. He says that as gas prices and inflation continue to climb, voters will show their displeasure for extreme environmental policies and “vote for the other party.”
That benefits Republicans, as under Donald Trump, the United States was an energy superpower.
“In those four years he was president, America was an energy superpower. And now this energy superpower is going around to the Gulf, begging OPEC plus to increase oil production. It’s absolutely extraordinary.”
As for Europe, Darwall believes significant political changes will likely occur in Britain and other countries, but Germany is fully committed to Net Zero.
When asked what would happen if the West reversed its Net Zero policy and returned to producing oil and gas, Darwall replied, “That’s a catastrophic outcome for Russia. Because Russia is a natural gas oil exporting country and economy, and it really, it needs those foreign currency earnings.
“Its economy depends on it. So, it would be terribly bad. It would be awful for Russia. That’s why I say that Net Zero is Vladimir Putin’s best ally.”
Dennis Prager explains in his American Greatness article Explaining Conservatism. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
The next time a liberal or left-wing friend or relative asks you
what conservatives stand for, say “liberty”—especially free speech.
There are a number of reasons many young people shy away from conservatism.
The most obvious is that they have been exposed only to left-wing values—from elementary school through graduate school, in the movies, on television, on social media and now even at Disneyland.
Less obvious but equally significant is that they have never been properly exposed to conservative values. Since at least the World War II generation, most parents who held conservative values either did not think they had to teach their children those values or simply did not know how to do so. Most still don’t. If asked to define conservative values, most conservatives will be tongue-tied.
In light of this, I present here, and in subsequent columns, a list of conservatism’s defining characteristics.
We will begin with the most important conservative value—liberty.
Conservatives believe in individual liberty (there is no liberty other than individual liberty). It has been the primary value of the American experiment. While many countries include the word “liberty” in their national mottoes and national anthems, no country has so emphasized liberty as has America.
That is why:
The French designers of the Statue of Liberty gave the statue to America.
The iconic symbol of America is the Liberty Bell.
The one inscription on the Liberty Bell is a verse about liberty from the Book of Leviticus: “And you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants.”
Americans sing of their country as “the land of the free” and “sweet land of liberty.”
Until recently, every America schoolchild knew by heart Patrick Henry’s cry, “Give me liberty, or give me death!”
Chinese young people who protested the Communist takeover of Hong Kong waved the American flag.
And that is why America’s founders were adamant that the state—the national government—be as small, as limited, as possible. The bigger the government, the smaller the liberty. Big government and big liberty are mutually exclusive.
Moreover, liberty is not the only victim of big government. Human life is also a victim. Every genocide of the 20th century, the century of genocide, was committed by big government. Without big government, one hundred million people would not and could not have been slaughtered, and a billion more would not and could not have been enslaved. (There was one exception: the Hutu genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda, which was tribal in nature. Tribal culture, like left-wing culture, emphasizes the group over the individual.)
In order to limit the size and power of the national government, the founders delegated most governmental powers to the states.
They did so in the Constitution by specifying what powers the national government had and by asserting that all other powers be delegated to the states. In addition, they increased the power of the states by having presidential elections decided by the states—the Electoral College—rather than by the popular national vote, and by how they structured the Senate, one of the two branches of Congress. They gave every state equal representation in the Senate, no matter how small the population of the state.
The Left’s opposition to the Electoral College and to the Senate makes perfect sense. It is the power inherent in big government, not liberty, that animates the Left. The defining characteristic of every left-wing party and movement in the world has always been an ever bigger and therefore more powerful government.
Liberty is a liberal value as well as a conservative value, but it has never been a left-wing value. Liberty cannot be a left-wing value because the more liberty individuals have, the less power the government has. Conversely, the weaker the state, the weaker the Left.
This especially holds true for the greatest of all liberties—free speech.
Free speech is a fundamental conservative value, and it has been a fundamental liberal value. But it has never been a left-wing value. For that reason, everywhere the Left is dominant—government, media, universities—it stifles dissent. The reason is simple: No left-wing movement can survive an open exchange of ideas. Leftist ideologies are emotion- and power-based, not reason- or morality-based. So, leftists cannot allow honest debate.
They do not argue with opponents; they suppress them.
For the first time in American history, freedom of speech is seriously threatened—indeed it has already been seriously curtailed. With the ascent of the Left, the inevitable suppression of free speech is taking place.
That liberals—who have always valued liberty and free speech—vote for the great suppressor of liberty, the Left, is the tragedy of our time. The reason they do so is that liberals forgot what they stand for; they only remember what they believe they stand against: conservatives.
So, the next time a liberal or left-wing friend or relative asks you what conservatives stand for, say “liberty”—especially free speech. And explain that is why you fear and oppose big government—because big government and individual liberty cannot coexist.
Black and white group photograph of immigrants posing for a photograph aboard the passenger ship Italia. Donato Sforza emigrated from Italy with his family in 1959 and are part of the group in this photograph. According to the archives at Pier 21 in Halifax, Nova Scotia the Italia stopped at the following ports: New York, Montreal, Quebec, Halifax-Plymouth, Havre, Southampton, Zeebrugge, Cuxhaven and Hamburg.
Like America, Canada is a nation comprised of people from around the world. And like America—perhaps even more than America—Canada is wearing racial blindfolds that make the government incapable of seeing that, just as “people of color” represent many different races, lands, and cultures, the same is true for “pale faced” people. This blindness erases Canada’s rich ethnic history.
As an anthropologist who spent 17 years living and working in Sub-Saharan Africa, where Black lives really matter and where everyone belongs to a tribe with which they identify, it pains me that I must explain to fellow Canadians (and Americans) that pale-faced people are not all the same. Are they just one thing — that is, one ethnic group in contrast to the myriad of “others”? No.
Canada’s government allows residents to choose from the following menu as a form of self-definition: White, South Asian, Chinese, Black, Filipino, Arab, Latin American, Southeast Asian, West Asian, Korean, Japanese, and First Nation. I found the most interesting category, “White.” No, there is no such thing as just “White.” Let us consider for a moment all those founding Canadian citizens—the “pale faces”—who were either born here or moved here from abroad.
The flag of the city of Montreal honors the founding races. It includes the French fleur de lis, the English rose, Irish shamrock and Scottish thistle. The Iroquois tree represents aboriginal people.
The first group of Canadian pale faces is the French-speaking citizens of Quebec and other parts of Canada whose ancestors came from France and settled here. They have a strong provincial government that protects and encourages their language, literature, music, poetry, film, scholarship, historical monuments, and all those other things that make a culture distinct.
The Quebecois, as they call themselves, are an ethnic group with a clear sense of who belongs and who does not belong. This week they elected a government that wants to limit immigration and protect the descendants of the founding population.
Then there are the descendants of the Protestant English and the Protestants of Northern Ireland, who founded the area of Upper Canada and conquered the Quebecois, allowing them to retain their culture and religion but insisting that England and things English be the beau ideal of the state.
They knew who was in and who was out. In Ontario, until WWII, there was little chance of a government job if you were not Protestant. British subjects hired British subjects and their children. They intermarried and kept apart from others. In slang, they are called WASPS, and their elites ran the country politically, economically, culturally, and religiously until the 1960s, with some elite Quebecois input.
Canada has many Celts: Irish Catholics, the fourth largest ethnic group in the country, who came from Catholic Ireland (the Republic), and the Catholic communities from Ulster. They are family-oriented, have a deep historic identity, and a culture of song, dance, and literature that they often justly feel may be better than the English speakers who call themselves English. Some of them still speak kinds of Gaelic.
Next come the Scots, lowland Protestants, highland Catholics, and later splinter groups like Presbyterians—but all of them feel Scottish and, similarly, there are the Welsh.
Image: People who look diverse – including those “White people,” by rawpixel.
Other pale faces have arrived since these founders. There are Central European pale faces, such as the Dutch, Belgians, Germans (who were once a majority in Kitchener, Ontario), Scandinavians and, of course, the non-conformist Protestant German-speaking Amish and Mennonite religious communities that have flourished here. The same region sent Czechs, Poles, Slovenians, Slovaks, Bulgarians, Serbs and Croats, Ukrainians, Russians, and other Slavs who have been here as Orthodox, Catholic, and Evangelicals for more than one hundred years.
Every one of these groups is ethnically distinct and has its own culture.
There are also the “second class” pale faces, such as Catholic Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians, and Orthodox Greeks, all Mediterranean peoples. Although Canada’s Anglo-Canadian-Celtic founders recognized them as some sort of second-order European, these same founders often felt that they just had too many swarthy members and, therefore, were second class. That’s why places used to have restrictive signs about Jews, Catholics, and Blacks.
And what about those Jews? Who are they? Sometimes they look German, Ukrainian, or Sicilian. Still, the constant is that other pale-faced Canadians have always treated them as second-class citizens who must “prove their loyalty.” Like the Jews, the Roma are treated as White, too, despite their Indian subcontinent origins.
Until long after WWII, most of these “pale face” groups were endogamous, and many still are, statistically speaking, meaning that they married, lived and, often, worked among each other and not members of other ethnic groups.
So why are all the pale faces, and almost pale faces,
these days lumped together as Whites on a government census?
This is very bad anthropology. It is not science-based. It is not empirical, and—God forbid! —it’s not evidence-based either. Also, remember that some pale-faced groups hate and persecute other pale-faced groups, a key aspect of many “ethnic boundaries.” Consider the war in Ukraine! This is just one example.
The madness of this census and its broken categories comes down to one thing: political correctness and Critical Race Theory, which, when taken together, must invent a category of “White” so proponents can blame everyone else’s suffering on this social construct. This ignores the fact that pale-faced ethnic groups are as diverse as people of color. If we were to take the CRT acronym of DIE (“diversity, inclusion and equity”) seriously, then these groups and the individuals who comprise them should be allowed to self-define.
Since we now live in a society that allows us to choose our pronouns, why can’t we choose our ethnicity as our fundamental defining feature, for it realistically includes things like neighborhoods, religious affiliation, and a way of looking at the world (not to mention good food)?
Should not, according to this twisted logic, the next government census reflect this multicultural truth? Can I again quote singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen (deceased member of one of Canada’s transnational minorities) because the truth is, “Everybody knows.”
These Canadian census categories are very bad anthropology. They are unbalanced, and they are used to reduce hiring in the private sector and the government by those who are naïve enough to check off their category as “White.” The newspapers here are full of examples, and the policies are not hidden. Affirmative action based upon these bogus anthropological categories is totally out of control in this once fine country.
Canada and Canadians are at their best when they reject the politicization of personal identity; when they abide by the shared traditions of Anglo-American law and the Judeo-Christian tradition; and above all, when they are judged by the quality of their character, not by the color of their skin or ethnic identity.
Canadians, like Americans, must reject the politicization of ethnic labels. Give the study of ethnicity back to the anthropologists, for that is where it came from. Let us once again become individuals, equal under the law.
Lyrics:
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died
Everybody talking to their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long stem rose
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that you love me baby
Everybody knows that you really do
Everybody knows that you’ve been faithful
Ah give or take a night or two
Everybody knows you’ve been discreet
But there were so many people you just had to meet
Without your clothes
And everybody knows
Everybody knows, everybody knows
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
And everybody knows that its now or never
Everybody knows that its me or you
And everybody knows that you live forever
Ah when you’ve done a line or two
Everybody knows the deal is rotten
Old black joe’s still pickin’ cotton
For your ribbons and bows
And everybody knows
And everybody knows that the plague is coming
Everybody knows that its moving fast
Everybody knows that the naked man and woman
Are just a shining artifact of the past
Everybody knows the scene is dead
But there’s gonna be a meter on your bed
That will disclose
What everybody knows
And everybody knows that you’re in trouble
Everybody knows what you’ve been through
From the bloody cross on top of calvary
To the beach of Malibu
Everybody knows its coming apart
Take one last look at this sacred heart
Before it blows
And everybody knows
Everybody knows, everybody knows
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
Footnote:
I doubt Leonard Cohen had climate or social justice in mind when he wrote this masterpiece. But he did have a pertinent poetic insight; namely, that social proof is an unreliable guide to the truth.
Philip Cross writes at Financial Post Canada The real threat to democracy. Excerpts in italics with my bolds
Having failed at the ballot box, millennial climate activists will
pursue any means to impose their will on society
There are a number of important outcomes from Monday’s election in Quebec. Two of the most important are the eclipse of Quebec’s traditional political parties by new ones, including the Conservative Party of Quebec, and the growing gap between voters in Montreal and the rest of Quebec. But the feature I want to emphasize is the failure of the radical Québec Solidaire (QS) party to significantly expand its base.
Québec Solidaire based its campaign on the environment. It emphasized the existential threat of climate change that teenage activist Greta Thunberg trumpeted at a much-publicized 2019 rally in Montreal where she made the empty boast, “We are changing the world.” QS co-leader Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois called this election “the last chance” to stop climate change, as if Quebec’s actions could have any significant impact on global emissions.
The failure of Québec Solidaire to mobilize more support shows that even Quebec’s supposedly progressive electorate does not support the wholesale reshaping of our society and economy to combat climate change. The Green Party similarly failed to make the case for environmental supremacy at the federal level, seeing its share of the vote halved in the 2021 election from its already low level of six per cent.
Unfortunately, the failure of parties focused on the environment and climate change to win at the ballot box does not deter activists from looking for other means to impose their views on society. The mainstream media portrays the authoritarianism of populist movements such as Donald Trump’s as the greatest threat to democracy today. But this ignores how environmental groups resort to government regulations and lawsuits to circumvent the popular will and achieve their own goals.
Having failed to make their case in the political arena, environmentalists increasingly are asking the courts to impose restrictions that voters have not supported. In a current case (Mathur v Ontario) six teenagers are asking the Ontario Superior Court to agree that climate change is violating their rights and order the government to implement measures to limit greenhouse gas emissions — even though Ontario only accounts for 0.3 per cent of global emissions. The Supreme Court of Canada recently refused even to hear a similar class action lawsuit from another group of young people.
It is unfathomable that courts would agree to usurp government authority and dictate energy consumption, which is the basis of our civilisation and our economy. Yet not one peep has been heard from the media about the anti-democratic nature of this initiative. Instead, Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault lauded the youths involved in the Supreme Court lawsuit for their “passion” instead of criticizing their attempt to circumvent the democratic process and subjugate Parliament’s will to the courts.
In her book Paradoxes of Prosperity, University of Cambridge economics professor Diane Coyle notes a fundamental difference between the protest movements of the 1960s and those of today’s millennials. Dissidents in the 1960s were fundamentally anti-authoritarian and libertarian, looking for ways to increase personal freedom and individual choice. Millennial movements, by contrast, especially among environmentalists, have a prescriptive agenda they want to impose on others. Columbia University historian Kim Phillips-Fein observed in her book, Invisible Hands, that environmentalists have long been “hostile to the very institutional framework of a free society.” Young people are especially likely to attach diminished importance to democracy: in a 2017 poll only a third of American youths agreed it is important to live in a democracy while 18 per cent said they would welcome a military dictatorship.
Political parties with radical and draconian environmental goals have clearly failed to win significant support from the electorate. What is different and worrisome for the future of democracy is the growing willingness of millennial social movements to impose their narrow agenda on the public by any other means available. The real threat to democracy today is, not the populist right-wing movements that preoccupy mainstream media, but the attempt of frustrated environmentalists to circumvent elections.
Nearly 50 new government defendants have been added to the lawsuit that alleges the government induced censorship of state officials and others on social media.
The second amended complaint in the case, Missouri v. Biden, includes six new agencies, bringing the total to 13, and 41 new individual defendants, bringing the total to 54.
Altogether, 67 officials or agencies are accused of violating plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights by participating in a “censorship enterprise” through pressuring Big Tech firms like Facebook, Google, and Twitter to take action against users offering alleged misinformation.
Evidence backing the claims has been produced in discovery, including exchanges between White House officials and Meta, Facebook’s parent company and messages showing meetings between administration officials and the firms.
The new defendants include the FBI; former White House senior COVID-19 adviser Andrew Slavitt; Dana Remus, counsel to President Joe Biden; Elvis Chan, an FBI special agent based in San Francisco; Janell Muhammed, deputy digital director at the Department of Health and Human Services; Allison Snell, an official at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency; the Food and Drug Administration (FDA); the State Department; and Mark Robbins, interim executive director of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
One or more of the Big Tech firms that were subpoenaed in the case identified the officials as possibly communicating with them on content moderation relating to “COVID-19 misinformation,” the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, the administration’s since-disbanded Disinformation Governance Board, and/or “election security, integrity, outcomes, and/or public confidence in election outcomes (not to include issues of foreign interference or related issues).”
Slavitt was named because emails show he was in communication with Facebook regarding the combating of alleged misinformation. The messages show that Facebook was committed to censoring and de-emphasizing posts that were “departing from the government’s messaging on vaccines,” plaintiffs said. Slavitt also called for Twitter to ban Alex Berenson, an independent journalist, previously released messages show.
Muhammed, meanwhile, was in touch with Facebook to ask the company to take down pages and accounts that were allegedly misrepresenting themselves as representing the government. “Absolutely,” one of the Facebook employees responded.
Other discovery suggests the FDA “has participated in federally-induced censorship of private speech on social media about questions of vaccine safety and efficacy, among other subjects,” plaintiffs said.
The agencies that were added to the case did not respond to requests for comment.
U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee overseeing the case, recently ordered defendants named in earlier complaints to comply with demands, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, a top medical adviser to Biden. The new documents do not include any more information from Fauci or the White House press secretary’s office.
The four groups in question – Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and social media analytics firm Graphika – comprise the “Election Integrity Partnership,” which exists as a ‘concierge-like’ service for federal agencies such as Homeland’s Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and State’s Global Engagement Center to flag online content for censorship or monitoring by Big Tech using a “ticket” system.
Unsurprisingly, the head of Stanford’s Internet Observatory is a Clinton donor who previously served as Facebook’s Head of Security – while the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public is largely funded by the Knight Foundation, whose board exclusively contributes to Democrat or Neocon entities.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration empowered three liberal groups to file tickets seeking censorship; the Democratic National Committee, Common Cause and the NAACP.
In 2020, we collaborated with Stanford (and others) to address misleading information about the election. Our team published a blogpost analyzing the spread of a video produced by Project Veritas. They threatened and then sued us (trying to silence our criticism). They lost. https://t.co/eJw3iKgKme
Also, we're getting the band back together (with several improvements) for the midterms — working with a range of collaborators to address rumors, misinformation, and disinformation around election processes and procedures: https://t.co/IuwvV27R1L. Follow @2020Partnership.
Kelli Buzzard writes Climate Imperialismat American Mind to explain how climatist overlords are oppressing the lives of ordinary people who live in places like the nation of Hungary. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
E.U. energy mandates impose needless suffering in the name of elite fantasy.
The American intellectual Rob Henderson coined the term “luxury beliefs” to describe the status-conferring ideas and opinions of wealthy elites. Examples of these beliefs include “defund the police,” “dismantle the patriarchy,” and “net zero carbon now.”
Luxury beliefs have the attractive quality that those most likely to promote them rarely face their consequences. For example, the “defund the police” crowd tends not to live in crime-ridden inner-city neighborhoods that count on the police to maintain order. Statistically, those who rage against the patriarchy and traditional marriage eventually marry but divorce at much lower rates than other Americans.
Nowhere is this trend more clear than in the disastrous realm of climate policy.
Climate activists who call for a ban on fossil fuel consumption and a phase-out of the combustion engine almost always live in metro areas where they don’t need a car.If they drive, they can afford $5-a-gallon gasoline or can buy a $66,000 electric vehicle.
Meanwhile, their luxury beliefs become public policy and hurt the rest of us.
In recent months, for example, the U.S. government passed a climate change bill masquerading as a measure to reduce inflation. In Europe, the E.U. has committed to becoming carbon neutral by 2050. The uber-elite internationalist group, the World Economic Forum, linked arms with the Chinese Communist Party in a bid to “radically transform” the world economy and stave off “climate catastrophe,” which amounts to the “real battle of our time.”
The premises of climate alarmism are almost all entirely untrue. Natural disaster-related deaths have declined, not increased, and plastic waste danger is overblown. While the world’s capacity to produce more food has skyrocketed, climate change has contributed minimally to the world’s wars, and the destruction of rainforests has little to do with changes in the climate.
But the fantasies of climate hysteria prompt hasty, radical action, resulting in developing nations being denied the cheap energy sources they need–coal, wood, dung, fossil fuels—to grow wealth, rise out of abject poverty, and enjoy the option of developing green policies in the future.
Hungary and Cold
The case of Hungary, where I work and write, is not as dire as in impoverished places like rural Asia or Sub-saharan Africa. Nonetheless, the carbon-neutral policies from Brussels, London, and Washington have affected every aspect of Hungarian society.
Hungary is a small, landlocked former Soviet-bloc nation located in the heart of Europe. As a member of the European Union, Hungary must adopt European Green Deal policies, which seek to “decarbonize” the continent by 2050. This has resulted in a push to diversify the nation’s energy supply by building solar farms, embarking on new nuclear energy plant projects, and installing solar panels on government and residential buildings. But green energy sources are not only insufficient to meet the nation’s energy demands. They are also unreliable depending on the weather.
So Hungarians, ever-realistic people, rely on fossil fuel sources in the interim.
More than half of Hungary’s energy comes from imported fossil fuels. Like Germany and other Western European nations, Hungary has gotten most of its natural gas and oil supplies from Russia in the past. But Hungary has long sought to diversify its energy sources. Toward that end, during the Trump Administration, the Hungarian government inked a deal to import natural gas from America through a Croatian port. The agreement was promising, as America was an energy-surplus country and a willing trade partner. The deal fell apart, however; the United States canceled the contract on day one of the Biden Administration.
Hungary has also sought to offset its fossil fuel consumption by adding nuclear power to its mix, thus promoting greater energy security by relying less on Russian oil. The nation currently operates four nuclear power plants and is looking for an international partner to build two more. But, ironically, the only company to offer a bid on the project was Russian nuclear power giant Rosatom.
In the wake of the war in Ukraine, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is routinely called “Putin’s Puppet” or similar derogations. Central to the name-calling is Prime Minister Orbán’s realism. While he supports efforts to reduce carbon emissions and plans to generate up to 90% of his country’s energy from nuclear and solar sources by 2030, Orbán’s more significant concern is how to preserve his nation’s way of life now. The truth is that Hungary needs oil and gas to survive. As a result, the Hungarian Prime Minister roundly rejects calls to cut off those sources, regardless of internationalist green energy policies or Russian aggression in the neighborhood.
At present, the war next door in Ukraine rages on and shows no signs of stopping, NATO sanctions notwithstanding. Russia shopped for new buyers and created new oil trade relationships with countries like China and India. Putin, his coffers burgeoning, recently turned off Europe’s gas supply, promising not to turn it back on until western sanctions are lifted. The action, of course, resulted in skyrocketing fuel costs across the continent, including here in Hungary. Like it or not, Europe, which has allowed itself to be captured by climate extremism, cannot at present survive on green energy sources alone. The continent relies on Russian gas and will for quite some time to come.
Climate Lemmings
Despite the prime minister’s resolve, Hungarians are facing the facts:heating prices are projected to increase at least 6-fold during the winter; a local university is considering closing its dorms; Budapest bridges and public buildings are shutting lights off two hours early every night; Budapest’s trams, trolleys, and escalators may shut down; sharp increases in freight rates threaten to spike the costs of household goods and food; a Hungarian energy company just went bust; the national opera reduced its performance line-up by half; and the tourist sector in Budapest may collapse altogether.
I recently celebrated my first anniversary of living in Hungary by moving into a smaller, more energy-efficient apartment and purchasing the warmest winter comforter money could buy. Because by all accounts, without drastic reductions in use, my energy costs will increase six-fold in the coming months. No luxury belief will change that.
The true divide in our ongoing civil war is not geographical but political. It is between those who covet the power to control others and those who want to be left alone. Within this context, the geography comes into view: it is a conflict between metropolitan Washington, D.C. and the whole rest of the country. And it had already been started some years ago during the Obama presidency.
The battles are being fought in the media, the courts, and legislative chambers and occasionally boiling over into the streets.
Agents of the state are becoming increasingly more obvious in their efforts to suppress dissent.Political crimes have emerged as an ostensible new class of offense…where nothing is stolen and no one is actually harmed, but resistance to authoritarian control threatens the well-being of those who covet power.
How can such a small area dominate so vast a continent? They have the power, or at least they think so. When the eleven Confederate states seceded, 70% of the officers of the U.S. Army joined them. For a while then, the tail managed to wag the dog. Then the larger picture began to take shape.
It was into today’s milieu that emerged one Donald J. Trump as a perceived reckless iconoclast — smashing the idols of authority regardless of the consequences. After all, apple carts were meant to be upset. And while the authoritarians have used every weapon in their arsenal, Trump’s stature has grown. Thus, the shoddy tactics being used against him have morphed into clichés, losing much of their effectiveness. Even fear, the most reliable tool in the box, is no longer getting the job done.
First, we were endlessly harangued about how we’re to blame for subtle trends in the weather.Then a strange virus of possible man-made origin is portrayed as an emergency requiring significantly more authority on the part of obviously fallible officials. Statistical deception was employed to the point of reductio ad absurdum.
Add to this the attrition of key members of the media. Bari Weiss, formerly of the N.Y. Times; Matt Taibbi, formerly of Rolling Stone; and Sharyl Attkisson, formerly of CBS, are three of the more notable defectors away from the Orwellian nightmare of modern journalism. There are pro-state authoritarians scattered throughout the nation — just as the Confederacy had supporters in the Union, though they were mostly along the border regions. The difference is that today’s statists have typically been trained by a corrupt education establishment. Over time, some will realize how they’ve been misled.
This conflict is hardly contained within the United States. But socially stratified Europe and Asia were especially more vulnerable to the dogma of Marxist class struggle than the bourgeois paradise we call America. And thus, Americans are more familiar with freedom and are hence more hostile to tyranny. The complaint and the alarm are that the forces of authoritarianism have succeeded as much as they have in the last few decades. Systematic indoctrination in the class rooms accounts for much of this; and from there, it has spilled out through the media.
Ideas and information are the true weapons in this struggle. This explains why the other side is so hell-bent on manipulating the language. Yeah, and we’re wise to that, too. They are so superficial that they actually believe that such nonsense as banning gendered pronouns will be taken seriously.
One question destroys the liberal/conservative narrative fiction:
Were Stalin, Mao, and Hitler “ultra-liberal”?
Because if this is supposed to be the political spectrum model for the world — and logic presupposes that must be the case — then having it range from ultra-liberal to ultra-conservative poses a big problem: where do the “baddies” belong?
Consider all of this in the context of the political spectrum as the logical arrangement of ideologies based on their level of governmental control, with maximum and minimum levels at each end. It stands to reason that since socialism is the standard leftist ideology, with forced wealth redistribution and a centrally controlled economy, these would require the government to be at a maximum level; thus, this would be the left side of the spectrum. Also consider that it’s going to take the maximum government to take “from each according to his ability.”
Does the authoritarianism of the anti-liberty left along with the negation of property rights and the economic slavery of socialism seem amenable to liberalism?
Contrast that with the fact that the precepts of the pro-freedom right with an emphasis on liberty and limited government would mean minimal control. In fact, with the term “liberal” closely associated with liberty and minimal government, the logical conclusion is that all of these terms belong on the pro-freedom right.
A left-right political spectrum with maximum governmental control on the left and minimal governmental control on the right, easily accommodates these questions. That is not the case with the liberal/conservative canard, since maximum government would not seem to be amenable to an ideology closely associated with liberty.
Finally, consider this from author and engineer Robert A. Heinlein, encapsulating the whole issue with one test:
Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.
It does seem as though most people fall into one of two distinct groups. The first are control-obsessed collectivists who demand that we place the public good ahead of the good of the individual. Then there are those individualists who just want to be left alone.
Footnote: Jordan Peterson has some advice for the elites pushing this mad dash for Net Zero.
Transcript of Peterson’s concluding comments:
A better way forward would be to prioritize the problems that beset all of us on this still green, functional and increasingly abundant planet. With the requisite focus and attention demanded of a true political class elected by the people, capable of and willing to look at everything: Trying to fix where necessary; trying to maintain as much freedom and autonomy as possible. And stop simply capitalizing narcissistically on the mere appearance of action, knowledge and virtue.
We should obtain true cooperative consent from those affected: farmers, truckers, working-class people who have turned an irritated desperation to figures such as Trump. And work with them rather than forbidding them with your power or improving them so they will be finally worthy of your time and attention.
Help replace dirty energy with clean, if you must. But do it on your own dime and make sure that the results are cheap and plentiful, if you want to help the poor and the planet.
The warning bells are ringing. Listen to them before they turn into sirens. We will not advance without resistance through the straits of your enforced privation. We will not allow you to steal and destroy the energy that makes our lives bearable, and that produces our food and shelter and housing and the sporadic delights of modern life, just to address your existential terror. Particularly when it will fail to do so in any case.
We will not allow our children to be criticized, first for having the temerity to merely exist, and then to be deprived of the prosperous and opportunity-rich future we strived so hard to prepare for them.
We remain unconvinced by your frightened and self-congratulatory moralizing and intellectual pretension, ignorance of the limits of statistics and misuse of arithmetic. We do not believe finally and most absolutely that your declared emergency, and the panic you sow because of it, means that you should now be ceded all necessary authority.
So leave us alone: you centralizers of power, you worshipers of Gaia, you sacrificers of the wealth and property of others. You would be planetary saviors, you machiavellian pretenders and virtue signalers, objecting to power all the while you gather it around you madly.
Leave us alone, to prosper or not as a result of our own choices, as a result of our own actions, in the exercise of our own requisite and irreducible responsibility. Leave us alone or reap the whirlwind, and watch in consequence the terrible destruction of what you purport to save.
This election season candidates are getting lots of energy-related questions. Here are pro-freedom, pro-human answers to some of the most popular ones. Alex Epstein
♦ What’s your policy on energy, environment, and climate?
I believe in energy freedom: the freedom to use all forms of energy, with laws against emissions and practices that are significantly harmful and reasonably preventable.
5 key energy freedom policies are:
1. Liberate responsible development
2. End preferences for unreliable electricity
3. Reform air and water emissions standards to incorporate cost-benefit analysis
4. Reduce long-term CO2 emissions via liberating innovation
5. Decriminalize nuclear¹
♦ Do you believe in climate change?
I believe in climate change, not climate catastrophe.
The world has warmed ~1° C in the last 170 years. Humans have some influence. But because we are so good at mastering climate, climate disaster deaths fell 98% over the last century.²
♦ Are you a “climate denier”?
I’m a climate thinker.
I recognize that climate is ever-changing, that humans have some influence, and that humans with plentiful energy can master virtually any climate. That’s why, as CO2 levels have gone up, climate disaster deaths have plummeted.
♦ What’s your plan to deal with CO2 emissions?
My plan is:
1. Recognize that CO2 emissions reduction can only be achieved humanely and practically a) long-term and b) through developing globally cost-competitive alternatives.
2. Liberate nuclear and other promising alternatives.
♦ Why did gasoline prices get so high this year?
While multiple factors, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, played a role, the fundamental cause is US and international anti-oil policies that prevent supply from rapidly increasing to meet demand.³
♦ Why don’t oil and gas companies drill more despite record profits?
Oil and gas would like to profit much more from currently high prices but it is difficult to increase drilling short-term under the present regulatory regime and investors are scared about more government punishment.⁴
♦ Why is Europe in a far worse energy crisis than we are?
Europe has taken anti-fossil-fuel policies further. For example, while we have allowed fracking to produce abundant energy Europe has largely banned it.
With the “Inflation Reduction Act” we are getting closer to Europe.⁵
♦ Do you believe in “all of the above?”
No, I believe in “always the best.”
We should always use the best form of energy for the job. E.g., we don’t use animal dung for energy in the US, even though it’s “one of the above.”
The best source of energy in any situation is what business and consumers choose as best on a free market with reasonable anti-pollution laws.
If something can’t compete on these terms then we shouldn’t use it—whether it’s animal dung, solar, or wind.
♦ What’s your position on solar and wind?
Solar and wind should be required to compete on a real market. In the context of electricity that means generators using solar and wind should be held to the same reliability standards as everyone else. Currently they’re not—which is disastrous.⁶
The root cause of our grid’s reliability problems is simple: America is shutting down too many reliable power plants—plants that can be controlled to produce electricity when needed in the exact quantity needed. And it is attempting to replace them with unreliable solar and wind.
♦ What’s your position on nuclear power?
Nuclear power is an extremely promising technology that is uniquely safe and clean, and has the potential to be cost-effective.
Tragically, nuclear has been nearly criminalized by governments. We need radical reform to decriminalize it.⁷
♦ What’s your position on electric vehicles?
Electric vehicles are a valuable product for certain people but not yet cost-effective for the vast majority of us. Let electric vehicles compete on a free market; don’t in any way pressure anyone to use them before 1) they can afford them and 2) the grid can handle them.⁸
♦ What’s your position on the “Inflation Reduction Act”?
It’s a 4-step recipe for ruining US energy:
1. Make us more dependent on unreliable electricity
2. Impose new oil and gas taxes during an energy crisis
3. Give EPA more power to restrict fossil fuels
4. Give more power to anti-fossil-fuel activists⁹
♦ How does the Inflation Reduction Act affect my state?
The Inflation Reduction Act got passed in large part by offering various payoffs to various states. Whatever benefit you get from those payoffs pales in comparison to higher energy costs, an unreliable grid, and a worse economy.¹⁰
♦ Do you believe in taking money from fossil fuel companies?
I believe candidates should proudly take money from fossil fuel companies if they and the company support energy freedom policies.
Fossil fuel companies are essential to the survival of 8 billion people for the foreseeable future.
For More on this from Alex Epstein
EnergyTalkingPoints.com: Hundreds of concise, powerful, well-referenced talking points on energy, environmental, and climate issues.
George Neumayer explains at the American Spectator The European Death Wish. Excerpts in italics with my bolds
It is seen in the boring hysteria about Giorgia Meloni.
The European elite’s sour reaction to the rise of Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s next prime minister, reveals less about her politics than its own. It harbors a death wish for Europe — a willfulness passed off as a “progressive” ideology that has led to a culture of death, demographic implosion, a floundering economy, and the prospect of a Eurabian future. Consequently, any European politician with even a modicum of common sense poses a grave threat to the elite. Its description of Meloni as a “fascist” is gaslighting of the first order — a lame projection of its own desire to build a coercive one-party state.
Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini was obviously an ideologue of the left, not the right — a socialist and atheist enamored by “progressive” schemes popular in the early 20th century. The unremarkable conservative and Christian views of Meloni bear no trace of that monstrous ideology of “human improvement.” It is the European Left, not the Right, that pushes eugenics against the disabled and elderly and that seeks to suppress freedom in the name of statism.
What European liberals call “progress” is just old barbarism and ancient tyranny
— the exploitation of the weak by the powerful — under a modern guise.
A crackpot devotee of the nihilism of Friedrich Nietzsche, Mussolini recognized no power above the state. He treated God as dead, much like today’s secularists who declare any deviation from their edicts evidence of bad citizenship. (In America, this now takes the form of a politicized FBI that treats pro-lifers and conscientious parents like criminals.) While not as overtly brutal as Mussolini, today’s progressives echo his eugenic intolerance and statist scheming. Their whole cult of abortion is based on a might-makes-right ethos that gives off a strong whiff of fascism.
In the mouths of progressives, “democracy” is nothing more than a euphemism for regnant and unchallenged progressivism.
Whenever woke hysterical bores pronounce someone a “danger to democracy,” what they are really saying is that that figure impedes their Nietzschean will to power. Even the tiniest steps away from the grave they are digging for Europe cause them apoplectic consternation. Recall the European Left’s bashing of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI for gingerly suggesting that Europeans procreate and stop poisoning the continent’s Christian roots.
Only in an age as unbalanced as this one would an Italian politician who quotes G.K. Chesterton and reads J.R.R. Tolkien be considered a threat to Western Europe. That Italian bishops are joining in these denunciations is another measure of our absurd times.
In other words, the Church in Italy is going to undercut one of the few politicians willing to support the revival of Christianity in Europe. Nothing that Meloni has proposed undermines Catholic social teaching. On the contrary, she pays homage to the central teaching underpinning it: The common good and the natural moral law are inseparable. Leave it to today’s hierarchy to treat the Church’s friends as enemies while protecting her foes. The progressives for whom Zuppi and company run interference abhor Catholic culture and seek to turn Europe into a relativistic wasteland ripe for an Islamic takeover.
If Meloni forestalls this future, that is all for the good. That future is a bleak one. She is right to say that the European Left wants to erase man’s God-given identity so that he becomes putty in the hands of the state. That was the ambition of Mussolini, and it remains the ambition of the godless progressives. The whole thrust of their thought is to deny God’s role in determining the good. With Nietzsche, they say that man, not God, is the measure of all things. Out of this subjectivism has come the torrent of transgenderism and all the other malign causes destroying the West.
Meloni simply recognizes the insanity of this subjectivism, which strips from man any identity rooted in God’s order and turns him into a slave of the state.
In truth, her espousal of Christianity is pretty mild, and she is hardly an old-fashioned traditionalist. According to the Italian press, she is not even married. She has a “partner.” But it doesn’t matter. The European Left will bay about her “theocracy” and “fascism” all while propping up politicians who actually subscribe to the statism of Mussolini. This is the European death wish — to kill its prophets and lionize its fools and enemies.
Background Post: Common Sense from Italy’s New Leader
The speech was delivered by Giorgia Meloni in 2020 introducing us to her worldview, values and purpose.. For those prefering to read her remarks, I provide a transcript lightly edited from the closed captions. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Giorgia Meloni Winner of Sunday’s Italian Election
Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends, I wish to thank you – thank you to our friends of the Edmund Burke foundation for inviting me to open this important event, for choosing Rome in Italy as a venue for this second edition of the National Conservative conference.
I entirely, entirely agree with your views on the need to put conservatism back into its traditional sphere of national identity. The great challenge facing us today is defending national identity and the very existence of the nation-states as a sole means of safeguarding people’s sovereignty and freedom.
This is why I find the title of Yoram Hazony’s latest book, The Virtue of Nationalism, effective. Because in a few words it clearly sums up the fact that our worldview is the exact opposite to what they would like to force on us. Yoram, your book will scandalize Italy. And I will gladly make my part on this effect because I intend to quote it frequently.
Our main enemy today is the globalist drift of those who view identity in all its forms to be an evil to be overcome and constantly acts to shift real power away from the people to supranational entities headed by supposedly enlightened elites.
Let us be clear, let us bear this clearly in our mind because we did not fight against and defeat communism in order to replace it with a new internationalist regime, but to permit independent nation states once again to defend the freedom identity and sovereignty of their peoples.
It is in this same spirit that today Fratelli d’Italia is fighting for a Europe of free and sovereign nations as a serious alternative to the bureaucratic super state that has been gradually foisted on us since the Maastricht Treaty, following the rationale of the external constraint whereby there is always someone who claims the right to take decisions in place of the sovereign peoples and the national governments.
And although that someone in Brussels or Frankfurt, Davos or the City of London lacks democratic legitimacy, every day it conditions the economic choices and the political decisions of those who have been vested with that legitimacy by the popular vote. It means that whether the false democrats like it or not, national conservatives in every latitude are actually the only real democrats. Because it is only by defending the nation state that we defend the political sovereignty that belongs to the citizens of that state.
But of course a national conservative cannot be content with claiming to be a democrat. Democracy without values becomes demagoguery, and can itself heighten decadence. I believe that it is not difficult for the conservative world to identify the substance with which we want to fill our democracies. We do not need the ideological indoctrination manuals that are so dear to the left.
Our vision of values and our worldview is actually quite simple as a great philosopher that Francesco mentioned who died a few days ago. Roger Scruton pointed out the real reason people are conservatives is that they are attached to the things they love. And another great father of conservative thought, John Tolkien, wrote a similar thing in one of the characters of his Lord of the Rings:
“I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”
This was Faramir’s worldview ; this worldview is embodied every day by millions of ordinary men and women and sometimes even by some of the great men of history. Throughout this history, where John Paul II and Ronald Reagan to whom today’s meeting is dedicated. John Paul II was a patriot who knew perfectly well that nations and the fact of belonging to a people sharing the same historical memory were the bedrock of the freedom of every man. He never tired of repeating that there is no Europe without Christianity, a teaching which is more topical than than ever today when the Christian identity of Europe is under attack by a distorted secularism that even attacks the symbol of the Christian tradition while throwing open the gates to the most intransigent form of Islam that wants to apply Sharia law in our European homelands. In which lies at the heart of the Islamic terrorism that has caused caused bloodshed in Europe and in the United States.
John Paul II’s patriotism also enabled him to view today’s historical events in the light of a Christian realism shorn of all rhetoric, as in the case of immigration. He considered that the right to emigrate had to be preceded first and foremost by a right not to emigrate, to live in peace and dignity in one’s homeland. Christian Petra was also critic of mass immigration when you think about that.
Today John Paul II would be on the European Union’s blacklist as a dangerous subversive; but not for us. Neither would Ronald Reagan have faired any better. More than any President of the United States, Reagan stood for the American “We the People” of that preamble to the Constitution that based national democracy on the principle of popular sovereignty, another great enemy of the globalist league.
I was very impressed by the metaphor Reagan used to describe the conservative movement as a three-legged stool. Without any one of these three legs, the stool will collapse. In the three legs of our defense, fiscal and social, defense– the first leg is a patriotic soul, which today would be called sovereignist. It means the defense of nation and interest in popular sovereignty.
The second leg is economic freedom, which means also a just relationship between government and taxpayers. A great lesson of conservative thought is that an oppressive tax system not only limits free enterprise, production and consumption, but it also destroys the commonality between the state and citizens. Because over taxation enforces the state to build up a system of controls similar to that of the totalitarian regimes, restricting individual freedoms.
Awakening the economy as a free enterprise, lower taxes, less bureaucracy, public investment in infrastructure and the defense of national interests this is the recipe with which President Trump today is making the American economy Strong. And it is the recipe that we would we would like to bring to Italy, to Europe as an an alternative to the blind austerity Germany wanted. which so far has only benefited Germany and the big financial speculators.
And the third leg is the social soul to protect religious and moral values, the noblest purpose of all political action. These values and principles are found in the three concepts of today’s meeting: God, Freedom and Nation. Or in the Italian formula to which I am very attached: God, Homeland and Family.
One of the founding values of conservative movements is the defense of the natural family. They would like us to give up defending the family, considering it to be an archaic and backward concept to be superseded. They would like to convince us that a family is any emotional bond between sentient beings; that it is a sign of great civil and moral progress to pay a poor mother to keep her child in her womb for nine months and then snatch it from the her arms to give it away to whoever has bought it.
We reject all this without a moment’s hesitation even though today it is considered highly scandalous and even revolutionary to say that a family is made up of a man and a woman and any children they may have, They are creating a world of alleged individual rights and formal freedom. In theory we are free or almost free to do anything we like: free to take drugs , free to have an abortion , to take the lives of human beings suffering from serious illnesses and therefore defenseless. Only rights and few if at all do this
Free indeed, but never free for the sake of something, for fulfilling a life project. Free indeed, but fenced in within a predetermined enclosure, because if you dare try to climb to clamber over it, you are censored by the new Menlo Park high priests of the only school of thought allowed.
So our task is to counter this drift and to reaffirm that the nation is the place where our values are safeguarded and transmitted, renewed every day as the common sense of the people forging an identity that is the greatest treasure in the world. Our opponents paint us as obtuse nationalists in love with old verities, rejecting any dialogue, ready to wage war on the slightest pretext.
But that is not the case. The sovereignty of nations is not out to destroy Europe, it wants the true real Europe of peoples and identities, not the abstract Europe decided in back rooms by technocrats. It does not want to impose its own interests at the expense of other nation states. When Trump says America first or we say Italy first, it certainly means defending the national economic interests of those countries.
But as conservatives I think we have to focus above all on the world of high finance and the great economic powers that are imposing their will on the nation-states. As I say it the message our homeland first means reaffirming the primacy of the real economy over the financial economy; of popular sovereignty over supranational entities with no democratic legitimacy. Modern national conservatism defends the identities of nations as the basis for the new forms of cooperation.
That is why while defending the Italian sovereignty, we cannot forget to defend Viktor Orbán’s Hungary or Kachinsky’s Poland, once again under attack from the European progressive mainstream. That is why, without the shameful ambiguity typical of the left, we defend the right of the State of Israel to its security and future peace and prosperity. Our patriotism is the will to defend our homelands from the great challenges of our age; challenges that will mark the future and the very survival of our civilization. We have to face together the division between extreme nationalism which is as bad as the weakness of ill-defined supranational entities such as the European Union.
The only possible answer must be the alliance of homelands that believe in a common destiny. It is this vision that has led us to join the great family of the European conservatives: the idea of a new Europe as a confederation of sovereign nation-states capable of cooperating on important matters while remaining free to take decisions regarding matters affecting our daily lives. It is much more than a choice of political positioning. It is taking up a firm stand and choosing sides.
I have an image in mind of President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II walking in the gardens of the president residence in Florida back in 1987. It is the image of two great men walking together alone along the paths of history in that brief period in the 20th century that was to change the world very shortly thereafter with the collapse of communism thanks also to them.
Remembering them here today it is not simply to pay them tribute. It is a warning, a commitment not to betray their dream of freedom, which is our dream of freedom too. Thank you.
Footnote: Confirmation that Media Pushing Left Wing Propaganda
USA Today: Giorgia Meloni: Who is Italy’s most far-right leader since Mussolini?
NY Post: Far-right pol Giorgia Meloni poised to become Italy’s first female PM
BBC: Far-right pol Giorgia Meloni poised to become Italy’s first female PM
The Guardian: Giorgia Meloni is a danger to Italy and the rest of Europe
CNN: Giorgia Meloni claims victory to become Italy’s most far-right government since the fascist era of Benito Mussolini
NY Times: Some Women Fear Giorgia Meloni’s Far-Right Agenda Will Set Italy Back
The Conversation: Giorgia Meloni and the return of fascism: how Italy got here
Summary: A person claims to be a proud mother, Italian and Christian. For this she is labeled: Far-right. Which tells you she is mainstream and the labelers are far-left.
Carson Holloway writes at American MInd Actual Malice. Excepts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Constitutional government demands a free but responsible media.
America’s corporate press is out of control. It claims to be an institution essential to successful self-government—and it would in fact be so, if it did its job responsibly. But all too often the American press seeks not to facilitate democratic deliberation by informing the voters but instead to shape political outcomes by dealing in hysteria and misinformation. More specifically, the corporate media routinely seeks to pull the nation’s politics leftward by using defamation to render prominent figures on the right odious to the public.
The case of Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz is only the most recent example. For much of the last two years, Gaetz has been the target of “news” stories, based on anonymous sources, that he was under investigation by the Department of Justice for sex trafficking. Now, we are told, career prosecutors are recommending against charges because of concerns about the credibility of the witnesses. This is another version of the same treatment given to Donald Trump before and during his presidency. For years Trump was subjected to innumerable breathless stories that he had “colluded” with Russia to steal the presidency. But when the investigation was over it turned out that Trump was guilty of no such thing.
These stories did not pan out, in the sense that they never led to legal charges, much less convictions. But they succeeded in what was no doubt their primary purpose. They were used to harass important figures on the American right, to hinder their political careers, and to prevent them, as much as possible, from engaging with voters on important issues.
As I argue in a new Provocations essay published by the Claremont Institute’s Washington Center for the American Way of Life, our press and our politics need not be this corrupt. Our present media culture of character assassination is not the necessary result of a free press.
It is instead the result of a licentious press, which is in turn the creation of a licentious Supreme Court.
In the English and American legal tradition, the time-honored remedy for false and defamatory publication is the libel suit. For most of our history, the real possibility that victims of defamation—including politicians—might sue for damages and succeed imposed a salutary check on the press. Simple prudence then required reporters and editors to make sure that allegations were true before publishing them. That wholesome discipline tended both to protect the reputations of individual Americans and, at the same time, to support the truthfulness of the nation’s political discourse.
This changed, however, in 1964, when the Supreme Court issued its opinion in New York Times v. Sullivan—a decision that revised American libel law and ushered in our present era of press licentiousness. Writing for his colleagues, Justice William Brennan used the Court’s ruling in the New York Times case to impose a novel First Amendment doctrine on the country. The original and traditional understanding of the First Amendment had held that libel was unprotected by the Constitution, that it was outside the scope of the “freedom of the press” enshrined in the First Amendment. The New York Times Court departed from that older understanding by holding that, henceforward, “public officials” would be held to a different standard than ordinary citizens when they sued for libel. Subsequent rulings expanded the new requirements to the more expansive category of “public figures.” The result: under the now prevailing standards, public figures must demonstrate “actual malice” in order to sue successfully for libel. That is, they must show not only that they have been defamed by false publication, but also that the publisher acted with knowledge that the published material was false, or at least acted with reckless disregard for its truth or falsity.
The ruling resulted in a kind of revolution in American libel law. Prior to it, public figures could and did sue successfully for damages when they had been the victims of false, defamatory reporting.Today, thanks to the actual malice standard, it is practically impossible to do so—even when the press has admittedly publicized falsehood. Thus, most recently, Sarah Palin’s lawsuit against the New York Times failed, even though the Times conceded that it had erred in its claims about Palin, because the court held that Palin could not demonstrate “actual malice” on the part of the Times.
Contrary to Justice Brennan’s claims, the “actual malice” standard is not required by the First Amendment. The Founding generation did not understand the “freedom of the press” to include a license to libel. They held that libel was wrong, was outside the scope of the freedom of the press, and gave no thought to special standards, applied selectively to different classes of citizens, that would permit the press to get away with libel in some cases.
By imposing the “actual malice” standard, the New York Times Court not only erred in its interpretation of the First Amendment. It did serious damage to our nation’s political way of life, by undermining several key goals of our form of government. Americans are rightly taught that the core function of their government is to secure the rights of the people. But the New York Times doctrine actually erodes protection for a valuable right—the right to one’s reputation. Our country is also premised on the idea of equality. The New York Times doctrine, however, creates inequality among various classes of Americans—most obviously between ordinary citizens and public figures, whose right to reputation is less protected. Finally, America was founded to be a self-governing nation.
But self-government is made into a charade when a pervasive culture of press dishonesty prevents the people from making rational and informed judgments about those contending for public office.
The Supreme Court helped to create these problems, and the Supreme Court can do a good deal to correct them. There are signs that some justices, such as Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, are interested in doing so. Their colleagues should join with them and reverse New York Times v. Sullivan at the earliest suitable opportunity.
Having failed to make their case in the political arena, environmentalists increasingly are asking the courts to impose restrictions that voters have not supported. In a current case (Mathur v Ontario) six teenagers are asking the Ontario Superior Court to agree that climate change is violating their rights and order the government to implement measures to limit greenhouse gas emissions — even though Ontario only accounts for 0.3 per cent of global emissions. The Supreme Court of Canada recently refused even to hear a similar class action lawsuit from another group of young people.
We reject all this without a moment’s hesitation even though today it is considered highly scandalous and even revolutionary to say that a family is made up of a man and a woman and any children they may have, They are creating a world of alleged individual rights and formal freedom. In theory we are free or almost free to do anything we like: free to take drugs , free to have an abortion , to take the lives of human beings suffering from serious illnesses and therefore defenseless. Only rights and few if at all do this
Carson Holloway writes at American MInd
The case of Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz is only the most recent example. For much of the last two years, Gaetz has been the target of “news” stories, based on anonymous sources, that he was under investigation by the Department of Justice for sex trafficking. Now, we are told, career prosecutors are recommending against charges because of concerns about the credibility of the witnesses. This is another version of the same treatment given to Donald Trump before and during his presidency. For years Trump was subjected to innumerable breathless stories that he had “colluded” with Russia to steal the presidency. But when the investigation was over it turned out that Trump was guilty of no such thing.
Science Matters 