As a kid, I had a recurring nightmare. I was being chased by a woolly mammoth, running for my life. It was the school that put the idea in my head. They said at the time that we were experiencing global cooling. A new ice age was coming. Many species would die, but the woolly mammoth that dominated the last age ice would come back. They would be everywhere.
The prospect certainly terrified me. I would wake in the morning to check that ice was not covering the ground, even though this was West Texas.
This was my earliest memory of “the scientific consensus.”
At some uncertain point in the future, official science dropped this prediction. The new prediction was for global warming. The ice was melting and the oceans were rising. Whole communities would be swallowed by the sea. Florida would shrink. It will be hot as blazes everywhere.
This time I paid little attention. That was a smart choice because after enough time, the specific prediction became elusive. Now the new threat was climate change. This was both impossible to prove and impossible to deny. Somehow governments have been enlisted to stop it, whatever that means.
Hey, climate, stop changing!
Again, I never entered into that grand debate because I had seen it too many times before, and the scam was unbearably obvious. With high-level measurements, charts, and models, you can prove anything. Obviously, there are many ways to measure “the climate,” permitting someone with a computer to tell any story he wants. The preferred stories would always follow the money.
Knowing this, I would never be bullied by demands that I turn over my brain to whatever science says at the moment.
Meanwhile, the media fell in love with “climate change” as a thing on which to report. All bad weather proved its existence. No more were there mere hurricanes, tornadoes, or floods. Everything that happened, anything that happened, could be rendered as proof of climate change and further evidence that we needed to put the government in control of everything.
Even now, this is assumed to be true on all legacy corporate media. You can hear about it daily on NPR and other select venues. Don’t you dare disagree because you would only demonstrate that you are not suitable for inclusion in polite society.
Looking back, I think I might have had one argument with one person about this whole notion. Upon revealing my incredulity, I could feel the walls come up, as if my interlocutor had discovered something deeply unpleasant about me. I clearly was not policing my thoughts well. It was like drinking the finger bowl at dinner or eating your dessert before dinner. My mild pushback was simply impolite, a social faux pas.
That’s when I realized that rational argumentation about this subject was pointless.
The polling around this subject approaches the absurd. “Do you believe in climate change?” is a ridiculous question because, of course, climate changes. “Are you worried about global warming?” presumes it is happening so, yes, of course, we should worry. “Should politicians care more about global warming?” elicits an easy yes because of course politicians should generally care about all things.
All these polls suggest that a solid two-thirds of the public is all in on the climate agenda, whatever that could mean.
But if you list the concern among all concerns including inflation and crime, you know what happens? It falls to near the bottom. In other words, mouthing clichés about this subject constitutes some kind of luxury belief, but it is not actually important in people’s real lives.
The climate change issue has been part of public life for 30 years, during which time many people were fine with outsourcing their beliefs to experts. But then the experts pushed their luck. They started shouting passionately about supposed truths that more and more people found to be untrue, such as that Trump’s 2016 victory was made possible by Russian collusion.
Despite that hundreds and thousands of reporters were on the case for three years, and despite an unprecedented campaign against a sitting president, there was zero evidence for the claim. That’s the period in which the dominant narrative of the media became highly questionable.
Millions of Americans and people all over the world started asking that devastating question: If they are lying about this, what else is there about which they are lying? That question alone raises a host of possibilities.
The COVID-19 experience came at the worst possible time for an already under-fire expert class. The climatologists were shelved by mass media, and a new team of experts was dialed in. These were the epidemiologists and virologists. Very fancy terms! Surely they know more than the rest of us.
Then came the models, beautiful pictures of how compliance will protect your health and exercising your freedom will make you sick. Based on expert advice, the science cooperated with government to wreck enterprise, community, schooling, and even religious freedom. It’s all worth it because a magic elixir is on its way that will fix everything.
Back in 2005, in my first article about lockdown fantasies concocted to control disease, I said that if this ever happened, it would permanently discredit government, medicine, public health, and every media venue and academic voice that supported it. That’s exactly what happened.
And why? Because the potion failed and caused even more sickness than before. This much is provable from the vital statistics alone: There was more death following the shots than before. The COVID experience challenged and ultimately killed whatever public credulity remained in public health agencies and mass media.
Now we are faced with a public culture that doesn’t believe anything coming from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention et alia. And what is the response? More pushes to shame the unbelievers. I’m thinking here of efforts such as Chelsea Clinton’s new podcast series called “That Can’t Be True.”
The point is to defend all vaccines, including the now deprecated childhood schedule; to defend baby formula, which she says is a “miracle of science”; and to debunk concerns over seed oils and the old food pyramid. In other words, the whole point of the effort is to oppose everything associated with the Make America Healthy Again agenda and rally support for the food, medicine, shots, and life regime that has made the United States the sickest country in the world.
The podcast will certainly fail the market test.
You see where this is going. The shift in science is following Thomas Kuhn’s model of a nonlinear shift in thinking that dismantles an old establishment and replaces it with a new way of thinking.
“Scientific revolutions,” he wrote, “are inaugurated by a growing sense, again often restricted to a narrow subdivision of the scientific community, that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately in the exploration of an aspect of nature to which that paradigm itself had previously led the way.”
Sorry, but this revolution cannot be stopped through constant claims of “disinformation” and attempts at censorship. The revolution is here, as painful as that may seem. We are finding our way back to unity between truth, freedom, and science. That is precisely where we should have been all along.
