Bandwidth does not permit me to list all the ways in which President Donald Trump (that never gets old, does it?) is causing the left to panic. The hue and cry from some members of the left would be audible in the Crab Nebula, while others are simply stunned into silence. That's fine. The incoming Trump administration isn't waiting around to hear them; they've got work to do.
One thing the Trump administration has no time for is climate fear-mongering. That's not to say that the Chicken Little types aren't still doing their thing, it's just that after Monday, they can no longer find a receptive ear in the White House, which is a good thing.
Here are two of a voluminous stack of investigative articles published by RedState, starting in 2021:
But lately, in the United States and elsewhere, government by fear-mongering has been generally on the rise in the last few decades. At the excellent UK website The Daily Sceptic, economist Dr. Tilak K. Doshi has presented some details.
Liberal democracies have a limited repertoire of state-sanctioned carrots and sticks, and none of these allow governments to easily trample citizens’ rights enshrined in law such as habeas corpus or the right to trial in a court of law. There are certain norms that apply to government action in modern liberal democracies, and these cannot easily be over-ridden. We call these norms civilised.
Nonetheless, we have witnessed in our lifetimes a new mode of practical politics observed by the great essayist H. L. Mencken. He said, in so many words, that our governments manufacture imaginary hobgoblins – creatures of the mind that can be mischievous, frightening and even dangerous – and then wait for citizens to clamour for safety.
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary
In serving those needs for safety, governments are more likely to get re-elected. Government by hysteria in other words, where fear and alarm are cultivated, then weaponised, for political ends.
This is a corollary, no doubt, with the Ayn Rand observation that you can't rule an honest man, as she wrote in her novel "Atlas Shrugged":
“Did you really think we want those laws observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them to be broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against... We're after power and we mean it... There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them.
And when people aren't scared, you scare them.
Dr. Doshi continues (in the story linked above), by describing two classes of fear-mongers: Climate and COVID.
The story is that the CO2 hobgoblins are the control knob of climate and, by extension, our cataclysmic future, a theory spread via the panic of a Swedish school drop-out who deleted her predictive tweet about the end of the world by 2023. Along with the Swede Greta Thunberg (now a campaigner for Palestinian rights) are the assorted ‘climate scientists’ who have conjured up the climate hobgoblins with their global warming ‘hockey stick’ charts and their pseudoscientific climate models duly adopted by the UN’s IPCC.
And:
If the climate hobgoblins were long in the making, the Covid variety were anything but. The first reports of COVID-19 emerged in late December 2019, when an outbreak of an unidentified form of pneumonia was reported in Wuhan, China. The World Health Organisation (WHO) and the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began reporting on the outbreak in January 2020 with individual cases reported in Thailand and elsewhere.
By March 2020, the World Health Organisation (WHO) had declared COVID-19 a global health emergency and named the virus “severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2”. It was also in March that WHO officially declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic.
So, let's take a look at the implications of this tactic.
See Related: Trump at Davos: The American People Want 'Nothing Less Than a Revolution of Common Sense'
WEF Elitists Bemoan the Fact That Americans Told Them to Pound Sand by Electing Trump
First: Government by panic is addictive. In the COVID panic, far too many people among the populations of the United States, Canada, and other civilized nations (including in Europe) allowed themselves to be locked up, to meekly obey masking and gloving restrictions - I was working in New Jersey when the COVID panic started, and I remember in the grocery store one had to not only be masked but gloved to enter; the aisles were marked with one-way arrows, which for some reason someone thought would help prevent transmission by making everyone face the same direction.
Second: Fear-mongering, be it on climate, COVID, guns, or anything else, allows politicians to engage in a typical tactic: "X happened. We need to do something. This (points) is something. We must do this!" It's a farcical way of doing political business, but unfortunately, it's also a deucedly effective way. It works - "assault weapons" are a classic example, where a type of weapon that can't be defined or described is nevertheless demonized in the press, and on the floors of Congress and state legislatures, by people who know less than nothing about firearms.
Third: This is an abandonment of the scientific method in the name of science. Climate data is gathered through questionable methods - Dr. Doshi notes, for example, the placement of temperature-monitoring stations on the side of taxiways at Heathrow Airport, while the COVID "six-foot separation social distancing" rule was pure horse squeeze, made up out of whole cloth, with no data behind it.
This is panic-mongering. It's Chicken Little on steroids, the promotion of hysteria for political gain. It is the purveying of pure bunkum to influence public policy. And, sadly, it seems an inescapable fact of political life in the United States and elsewhere.
