TO CONFRONT EVIL THE FIRST STEP IS TO EXPLAIN IT

A half truth is more calamitous than a total lie. We are the living proof of that. Two half truths and a body of total lies co-exist in a world toppled by the former but merely perverted by the latter.
The half truths, a pandemic and a change in climate, are real phenomena. They also happen to be concoctions of hysteria, of tricks of smoke and mirrors. George Orwell’s Animal Farm alerted us to watch out for elites claiming to help the helpless. And Mark Twain reminded us how much simpler it is to fool people than to convince them that they’ve been fooled.
Covid the excuse for lockdowns and climate the excuse for decarbonising, subvert liberty and play with lives on a scale made possible by our global village. We are into the second year of the lockdown experiment. Before anyone knew what the word meant, Americans were basking in the boom of a lifetime. For 60 years poverty hadn’t been so low and the employment rate so high. Blue-collar workers were lapping it up. As for minority groups and women, times had never been so good.
And then. Governments took a wrecking ball to it. From one quarter to the next, America’s economy plummeted by a third, the biggest decline ever. Britain’s contracted the most in 300 years. Unemployment in every Covid-hit country made it a second Great Depression.
The first was tragic enough. The lockdown depression was evil for two horrific aspects. The depression was imposed, and in many cases the motive was pain for political gain, with enrichment on top. Who bore the pain and who relished the gain was often decided by despicable narrow interests. The all powerful on Covid duty did not pursue health objectives as much as they balanced competing loci of power.
No sooner had Biden beaten Trump than his State governors eased their cruel lockdowns which helped him to win. No sooner had the Biden team got its hands on the dollar printing press than it bailed out blue states as recompense for their job and business killing lockdowns. By the same token red states got punished with smaller payouts for their Trumpian not so lethal lockdowns.
Had Covid interventions been purely for health and safety they’d surely have targeted the unhealthy and unsafe: infected and vulnerable people. That is largely what happened with SARS, MERS, Nipah, Zika and Mexican swine. Only Covid, the latest of a bad bunch, made governments fall back on taking away liberty. Interventions encroached on schooling and catering, trade and industry, entertainment and travel, for that matter on worship. Covid did not topple the world. Elected and appointed worthies did. They fooled citizens that lockdowns were for their own good.
They weren’t?
The answer to that question is another. Why did the goalposts continually shift? Lockdown to give health services time to gear up; then lockdown to flatten the curve; then lockdown to stop deaths; then lockdown to buy time to vaccinate to get herd immunity. And the goalpost is on the move again. Post vaccination, masking could remain and green passports will make the vaccinated a class of people with prized liberties.
There is but one explanation: goalposts shifted to adjust to political interests. Biden made a campaign promise to reopen schools. He has been months in power, but some 25 million American kids, or 50%, remain in school only part-time or are fully on Zoom. Why? Because the balance of power had moved to players with the clout of school boards and unionised teachers.
The politics of Climate bear the hallmarks of Covid politics. No. Climate steals a march on Covid. Not only the goalposts shift but the name of the cause. What began as ‘Global Warming’ became ‘Climate Change’ – a case of necessity being the mother of invention. Too manifestly to keep a straight face, the globe was blowing hot and cold. The name change permits the crème de la crème of causes to have it both ways.
Just in time. Texas the Lone Star energy colossus has had a record snowfall and the coldest temperature in three decades. People froze to death and millions had no electricity as the grid was deprived of green power from iced up solar and wind generators.
It caught a premier journal betwixt and between. In the same week as it wrote about the great freeze, it wrote about the cheapest way to cut carbon to prevent the world getting hotter.
‘Green maths’ it’s called. “Bill Gates,” blared the subhead, “is the latest to grapple with (it).” Finance & economics.
Gates can stand out for maths other than green. An Oregon school project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation could be the most perverted frolic ever indulged in by a Tech oligarch. “Ethno-mathematics” is the name of the subject. The project is a toolkit for “dismantling racism in mathematics.” By that is meant 2 + 2 = 4 is bad white man’s math, no good for kids of colour who may come up with a different answer according to the way their ‘non-white’ minds work. The “Equitable Math” toolkit funded by Gates trashes the old notion that there have to be right and wrong answers. Now 2 + 2 = 5 will be as good an answer as any. https://www.foxnews.com/us/oregon-education-math-white-supremacy
We began with a body of total lies. Equitable maths is a lie embedded in the whole body, known as ‘Wokeism’, itself based on a lie. Just as Nazism was based on the lie of the Protocols, so Woke ideology is based on the lie of police brutality in Ferguson Missouri. https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/289372. The ideology is perverting America while Covid and Climate, the half lies, are toppling it. French President Macron has called Wokeism toxic, and is determined not to let it spread to France as it has done to Britain. It is the Woke obsession with skin colour that troubles him. It is deeply racist and divisive: whites are execrated for their inherent racism and blacks are coddled – treated with kid gloves and get demeaning special treatment – because of their inherent fragility.
All ideologies emancipate thought from reality, but that doesn’t make Wokeism a crackpot circus. Far from it. It has upended academia and Democrat media (the likes of CNN and the New York Times) into Soviet-style Pravda propaganda super spreaders.
More frightening, the ideology has permeated the sciences and public health. Woke experts cancelled the Covid protocols to allow BLM and Antifa mobs to take to the streets. “White supremacy is a lethal public health issue,” said Jennifer Nuzzo a John Hopkins epidemiologist. “The danger of systemic racism is greater than the harm (catching) the virus could do.” A letter signed by a thousand public health experts gave the green light to de-masking and crowding. They didn’t want the religious to get the wrong idea. “Non-Woke gatherings for pray,” they wrote, “should not be confused with a permissive stance on riots for a good cause.” Think about that. From the President down, Wokes pin their colours to the mast of “following the science”, then mock Trumpians for their quackery.
Pandemic experts have cleared the fog for us. Covid is half a lie: the virus is scientific, the interventions are political.
All of it is small beer compared to the half lies of Climate. Consider the money. Biden has promised to spend $500 billion each year on abating climate change. Its economic impact, estimates economist Bjorn Lonborg, would reach $5 trillion, which is more than the entire federal budget. Or consider how jobs are cancelled at the stroke of a pen. Climate decrees put job-destroying lockdowns to shame. Among Biden’s first ‘green’ acts he cancelled the Keystone Pipeline with a loss of upwards of 10,000 jobs. An act to squelch fracking would cause a massive job loss. In Texas alone as many as 1 million good-paying jobs would be lost. Overall, according to a Chamber of Commerce report, a full national ban on fracking would cost 14 million jobs, more than the 8 million lost in the Great Recession, with the potential of turning towns into slums.
Green policies to eliminate fossil fuels, in common with lockdowns to eliminate Covid, have consequences for regions and for classes. Industry and blue collar workers are hardest hit. Regulations eliminate low paying jobs more than any other, hitting immigrants and blacks more than any other. And jobs go offshore, undermining the upward mobility of the working and under classes. Consumers also are hit hard by green virtues. There has been a rapid expansion of energy poverty in both America and Europe. As many as one in four Germans, and three out of four Greeks have cut other spending to pay their electricity bills.
Like advocates of the lockdown, Wokes are fiendishly selfish. They vaunt their green obsession and expect the vast interior of America to feed it. For coastal elites, despoiling the desert with solar and wind farms is not a problem; they don’t have to look out on metallic giants. According to a 2019 report, decarbonising California would take 3 million acres of natural and agricultural land. A study reckons that building enough solar power to reduce U.S. emissions by 80% in 2050 could occupy upwards of 27,500 square miles.
Covid panicked lockdowns chewed economies, currencies and lives for nothing. Is there a climate problem to justify a devastation that makes the lockdown’s look skinny? Is it a scientific truth that only by keeping the temperature from rising more than 1.5 degrees can we prevent doomsday? And will that day come even if we can’t keep the thermometer down?
Certainly ‘end-of-the-world-is-nigh’ criers think so. They are preparing for doomsday by not procreating any more.
A silly projection record means nothing to climate addicts. An AP headline back in 1989 screamed: “Rising seas to obliterate nations by 2000.” The sensational news quotes a Director of the New York office of the UN Environment Program. Entire nations, he warned, could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if “global warming is not reversed by the year 2000. Governments have a 10-year window before the greenhouse effect goes beyond human control.” The Independent on 20th March 2000 had this headline and content: “Snowfalls are a thing of the past. Britain’s winter ends tomorrow with striking evidence of further environmental change. Snow is starting to disappear from our lives. According to Dr David Viner a climate academic, winter snowfall will be a rare and exciting event.” In 1998 Dr Jim Hansen appeared before Congress to predict the greenhouse effect. “In 20 years the Westside Highway which runs alongside the Hudson River will be under water,” he said categorically. “You’ll have signs in restaurants saying, Water by request only.”
Like Covid predictors, their Climate counterparts vie for a piece of the action by making fear-stoking predictions. We never get an apology when doomsday comes and goes. The opposite: the charlatans do more bare-faced crystal ball gazing, and keep their expert status intact.
In any case real data reveals the panic is for nought. Global warming has not been harmful; generations to come will not be obliterated. Instead of imperilling life on earth global warming has saved lives. A 2015study by 22 international scientists concludes that cold kills 17 times more people than heat. Deaths from natural disasters have declined by 80% during the period when the earth’s temperature rose. NASA data show that since 1920, the earth’s temperature went up by 1.25 degrees while world population quadrupled. The death rate from air pollution has fallen by 50% since 1990. University of Oxford economists show that “since 1990 the number of air pollution deaths per 100,000 people have nearly halved.
Alarmist rhetoric, clicks and scares, apocalypse-now projections, have led to panicked policies which deprive billions of a life worth living.
Tyranny, wrote Hannah Arendt, who knew more than anyone about it, causes people to lose the capacity to think. The ideal person for totalitarianism is the one who cannot distinguish fact from fiction or true from false.
If you cannot prove a man wrong, don’t panic. You can always call him names. Had the Victorian era relied on Twitter and Facebook, would Oscar Wilde have been so cool about it?