Free speech is under attack in the West, including the UK and the USA. Increasingly, anyone who wants free debate, who questions the status quo, who expresses doubts about the latest fashionable ideology, who demands evidence and data or who challenges any establishment theory in any way is labelled by the ruling class as a crackpot, a lunatic or, worst of all, a “right-winger”.
Blind, unquestioning acceptance is what is required by progressive leaders of opinion, total conformity. Censorship is left-wing, free speech is right-wing. The worst attack on free speech in the West that I have yet heard came last week from John Kerry, who stood as presidential candidate for the Democrats in the 2004 election (he lost to Bush Jnr). He was US Secretary of State from 2013 to 2017 and US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate from 2021 to March this year. Last week, before a world audience, he attacked the First Amendment of the American Constitution. This first and most important amendment was signed in 1791. It states:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
It is the bedrock of free speech in the USA. John Kerry was speaking last week at a panel meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) panel on Green Energy at the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Replying to a question about “disinformation” on climate change and green energy, Kerry attacked the First Amendment. Extracts from his reply:
But look, if people only go to one source, and the source they go to is sick, and, you know, has an agenda, and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence …
It is part of our problem, particularly in democracies, in terms of building consensus around any issue. It’s really hard to govern today. The referees we used to have to determine what is a fact and what isn’t a fact have kind of been eviscerated, to a certain degree. And people go and self-select where they go for their news, for their information. And then you get into a vicious cycle … Democracies around the world now are struggling with the absence of a sort of truth arbiter, and there’s no one who defines what facts really are. (My emphases.)
Here is the link to his reply (only 49 seconds): John Kerry calls the First Amendment a ‘major block’ to stopping ‘disinformation’ | Fox News. In the context of climate change, “disinformation” is any scientific report giving evidence that rising CO2 is not causing dangerous climate change. It doesn’t matter how good the science, how distinguished the scientists, how solid the evidence, anything suggesting climate change is not an existential threat is disinformation – which should be hammered out of existence. On the other hand, any statement, however ridiculous, warning of the “existential threat” of climate change must be regarded as gospel truth: there will be no ice on the poles by 2013; the world will roast to death by 2020 – this sort of thing must never be doubted.
Kerry’s attack on free speech was in the context of climate change but it is being attacked on many other fronts too, as we saw in horrifying detail during the recent Covid pandemic.
I met John Kerry in Cape Town in 2007. He spoke to a small bunch of journalists including me (a friend in the US Embassy smuggled me in as a “journalist”). He seemed a decent enough man. He was questioned on many things about US policy but not on climate change; it just didn’t come up. His answers were sensible and I agreed with them. He was against the Vietnam war and against the US invasion of Iraq. (He could not speak to us for very long but left us with his marvellous wife, Teresa Heinz, the most interesting gossip I have ever known.) Years later he played a major part in bringing about the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), also known as the Iran Nuclear Deal, which prevented Iran developing nuclear weapons in return for American trading favours. It was a good deal but Trump scuppered it, which was the only thing he did in his presidency to increase the likelihood of war; mainly Trump in action was a man of peace. In short Kerry was a good, sensible sort – until he became Presidential Envoy for Climate, after which he went mad, like so many otherwise sensible people. He behaved exactly as you would expect an elitist climate activist to behave: he travelled round the world in his very expensive private jet, releasing vast amounts to CO2, suggesting to international audiences that economy class air travel for poor people must be reduced or banned.
For the millionth time, rising CO2, caused by our burning fossil fuels, is having no effect on the climate (because above 150 ppm its warming effect is over) but a wonderful effect on the planet by encouraging plant growth. The science and data to support this is overwhelming. The only way that alarmists can maintain climate fear is by suppressing all the scientific reports that show climate alarm is nonsense, and by vilifying and censoring good scientists, and by banning evidence and data. Not only inconvenient opinion must be hammered out of existence, but inconvenient facts too. Most of the efforts of the climate alarm establishment are concentrated into shutting down all arguments and discussion about climate change. The alarmists do not want to win the debate, they want to stop it. The campaigns of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are directed to this end. The Climategate emails, leaked out by some whistle blower, showed the IPCC scientists planning how to hide data, delete data, lie and cheat, but above all silence any dissenting voices and end the careers of good scientists who questioned climate alarm. The outrageous Hockey Stick graph of the IPCC’s 2001 report was the most shocking example.
This fraudulent graph seemed to come out of nowhere, a revelation of the alarmist dream. Contrary to thousands of scientific reports and centuries of historical record, this graph showed temperatures in the northern hemisphere steady from 1000 AD to 1900 (the handle of an ice hockey stick), and then suddenly shooting up to unprecedented highs in the 20th Century (the blade). Hallelujah! Truth by revelation – in true religious fashion. Good scientists and mathematicians soon showed the graph was nonsense. The data on which it was based was awful (mainly discredited tree ring samples) and the method to convert the bad data into the Hockey Stick outright fraud. The climate science establishment, the politicians, the activists and the mainstream media immediately attacked not the fraud itself but anyone who had exposed it, calling them “deniers” or accusing them of being in the pay of the oil companies or some such evil entity. The main author of the Hockey Stick, Michael Mann, refused outright to show the statistical method he had used to derive it. The climate alarm establishment, the politicians and the mass media (including “investigative” journalists) all thought he was quite right to keep his method a secret. Our duty was not to question but to believe.
Climate alarmists either do not know how science works or do know and want to end it. Science proceeds by observation and experimentation, followed by deduction. If the prediction of a theory is wrong, the theory is wrong. That’s it. Elaborate theories predict that rising CO2 will cause dangerous climate change; observation over the last half a billion years show that it doesn’t. So the theories are wrong. That’s it. Popper demonstrated that theories can never be proved right but can be proved wrong. So, for practical reasons, if a theory is not shown to be wrong, we just work according to it until it is proved wrong. But this is not how climate alarm works. Climate alarm ignores wrong predictions; it works by revelation and blind faith. When Kerry speaks of “disinformation”, what he means is “heresy” or “apostacy”. “Denier!” means “Heretic!”.
Kerry muttered about the “social media” spreading “disinformation”. I’m afraid I’ve never used any social media (unless WhatsApp is counted as such) but I’ve heard that they do contain a lot of mad conspiracies and bigotry, as well as some interesting stuff. All the disinformation I’ve seen on climate change comes from the mainstream media, including the BBC, the New York Times, the Guardian, Bloomberg and The Economist. The BBC is probably the worst of all, carrying one false report after another of climate catastrophe. The South African mainstream media are the same, with the Daily Maverick leading the assault against science.
The grim and mad episode of the Covid pandemic showed another concerted, worldwide attack on free speech and science. An infectious but mild disease with a very low death rate, essentially zero among children, emanated from China and spread around the world. It was caused by a virus, and evidence suggested might have been manmade and leaked out of a laboratory. There were plenty of standard methods of dealing with it: treatment with various proven medicines, including the Nobel-winning Ivermectin; sensible protection of vulnerable groups, including the old and people with chronic illness; and careful, limited quarantines. If all this had been done, the death rate would have been low and damage to the economy would have been non-existent. Instead, all treatment was ignored or banned; Ivermectin was denounced as the Devil’s poison or a “horse de-wormer”; there were Draconian lockdowns, causing terrible economic damage and much greater loss of life than the virus ever could; and the imposition by coercion of dangerous, untested, not very effective Covid vaccines. Anyone who stood up against this destructive nonsense and for good medical science was howled down as an “anti-vaxxer” or “lunatic”. Good doctors were faced with losing their licences if they told the truth about the vaccines. After the whole medical establishment, including Anthony Fauci of the USA and our own medical authorities, had told us how very safe the Covid vaccines were, it was revealed by some whistle blower in the USA that Pfizer had compiled a very long list of adverse effects following its own vaccines, which included death, brain malfunction and permanent disability. The USA medical establishment tried to suppress this data and all of the mass media seemed to agree that it should be suppressed and tried to pretend it was disinformation. I don’t know of a single big media house in South Africa that told us about Pfizer’s data on the dangers of its Covid vaccines. Free speech on Covid-19, on the effectiveness of treatment and on the dangers and ineffectiveness of the Covid vaccines was silenced by sneers and censorship. Our Sunday Times denounced the truth-telling Dr Susan Vosloo as “Mampara of the Week”.
The silly ozone scare of the 1980s and 1990s was a forerunner of the climate scare and an early indicator of the war on free speech. The scare claimed that the use of CFCs (wonderful, very safe refrigerants) was depleting the ozone layer, causing the “hole” in the Antarctic and increasing the incidence of ultra-violet radiation (UV) reaching the ground in the USA and elsewhere. Actually there was little evidence of their doing so; the hole was a natural event discovered in 1956, long before CFCs were used on a large scale, and there was no evidence at all that UV radiation was increasing. In 1993, US Vice president Al Gore commissioned his Director of Energy Research, Dr William Happer, to investigate UV levels in the USA. Happer did so and reported that at every single measuring station in the USA, the levels of UV reaching the ground were decreasing. Gore fired him. The truth was not allowed.
John Kerry is lamenting that there is no “truth arbiter” and “no one who defines what facts really are.” He should have referred to George Orwell’s 1984, where Big Brother had set up a “Ministry of Truth”, which did define the truth. So did Hitler, saying in effect, “The truth is what I say it is” or Stalin saying, “The truth is what I say Lenin said it was.” Today, for the likes of Kerry, the preferred truth is what the IPCC says it is or what the giant drug companies say it is or what Anthony Fauci or Al Gore says it is. In the real world, we can only stumble towards the truth by constant observation and testing, by inviting constant criticism, by welcoming and arguing all points of view. You want to argue that the world is flat? Go ahead, show us your evidence and we’ll give evidence to show it isn’t. (This is as bad example. Nobody in the past thought the world was flat; the few who were interested knew it was round; most people didn’t think about it.) You want to argue that the god Jupiter rules the universe or that the Nazi Holocaust didn’t happen? Go ahead, show us your evidence and we’ll show you our evidence. Actually, these absurd arguments just wither away under the massive weight of observation and facts. On climate change, the evidence, if allowed to be presented and heard, is overwhelming, that rising CO2 is a boon not a problem. If you want to show counter evidence, go ahead and we’ll look at it.
But if you want to suppress free speech, you threaten Western Civilisation, and the science it is based on.
[Photo: by United States Department of State – Department of State, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24395911]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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