My big takeaway during the late COVID unpleasantness was how everyone got with the program, right now, from lockdowns to masks to vaxxes. Especially women. Most especially liberal women. I thought to myself: this is what humans do in a genuine crisis. Especially women.
But I flew to the east coast over Memorial Day Weekend 2020. At the Boston Logan car rental center there was one guy behind the counter. I went to get my car and the same guy selected my car for me. I went to the exit gate and the same guy was there in the booth to check my rental agreement and open the gate. Thank you, sir.
But what we learned, as the two weeks to slow the spread grew into years, was that the government had six ways from Sunday to censor anyone that didn’t support the narrative of lockdowns and masks and vaxxes.
Still, it was a shock for me to watch Tucker Carlson’s interview with liberal author Naomi Wolf, “third-wave feminist” and author of 1991’s The Beauty Myth. For 30 years she had lived at the tippy-top of Liberal-land, with all the right friends and getting invited to all the right parties and appearing on all the right media. I mean left media. Then, says Tucker,
Then she questioned lockdowns and the Covid vaxx.
Immediately her friends dropped her, the media appearances stopped, and no more parties for you, Naomi. As she tells Tucker:
Deplatformed from Twitter, from Facebook, from YouTube, but also all the newspapers and news outlets where I’d been a commentator or columnist for 35 years, ran pieces smearing me and saying I was, you know, spreading misinformation. And I was the anti-vaxxer… And basically I became a non-person on the left. I was kicked out overnight from my comfortable perch, you know, in the liberal elite media.
Paging Charles Lindbergh.
The point is that when a nation — any nation — goes to war it needs the entire population to get with the program, because we are under attack, because it’s a Day of Infamy. And if there are holdouts, then the government takes care of them, by censorship or by other means. That is what Naomi Wolf, dedicated liberal, learned when the U.S. declared war on COVID. In a war, a real war, there is no room for dissent. Indeed, if dissenters are allowed it is a signal that we are not really in a war.
Tom Steyer even got some fellow billionaires together to gussie up an existential crisis. The goal was
“making the climate threat feel real, immediate and potentially devastating to the business world”
Needless to say, the “real, immediate and potentially devastating” climate threat would require censorship, or at least the shaming of “climate deniers.”
My question is: can they do it? It’s one thing to talk climate crisis and shovel billions at EV manufacturers and fashionista EV buyers and wind farms and solar farms: that’s government as usual, shoveling free stuff at its supporters.
But it’s another thing to keep the “end of the world in ten years” crisis narrative going, year after year. It’s another thing when the government yanks up fuel taxes on the gilets jaunes and shuts down the Dutch farmers. It’s another thing when the U.S. government has to drain the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to show us that the Inflation Reduction Act is working and inflation is transitory.
It comes down to this. Humans respond to a real crisis: the young men join the colors; the Cajun Navy rescues the flood victims; the intelligence community tracks down the misinformation; the media censors the deniers. But the government better win, and soon.
Let me make a fearless prediction. I say that climate change will end up on the rocks, because humans are not here on this Earth to be ruling-class cannon fodder, year in and year out. They need to live their lives and wive and thrive.
And when the rulers start disappearing one of their own, like Naomi Wolf, well, you connect the dots.
Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.
Image: Michael Fleshman
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