Last Wednesday, conservative Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby cited me by name in a column about how liberals want to destroy free speech.
This represents the latest (last?) stage in what has been a textbook conservative media swarm. It starts when a movement ideologue (in this case Marc Morano, hired attack dog of Sen. James Inhofe) plucks a quote out of context from an obscure source (in this case, Gristmill) and uses it to caricature the entire left side of the political spectrum. Then the context-free, already-spun quote spreads like wildfire around the conservative echo chamber, which is always ravenous for tidbits that reinforce its worldview. After buzzing around for a while, it drifts upward, being cited on talk radio and eventually in mainstream outlets like Fox News and now the Boston Globe.
It's a well-oiled machine. I have no illusions that I can stop it or alter its course. The right's sense of aggrievement, its victim complex, is adamantine, and nothing I can do will dent it.
Nonetheless, I sent a letter to the editor to the Globe. They printed an edited version of it today. Below is the original:
Dear Editor,
In his column on Wednesday, Jeff Jacoby recounted a handful of anecdotes wherein people say mean things to conservatives. We're told this amounts to a War on Free Speech -- no doubt waged on the same chimerical battlefield as the War on Christmas.
Jacoby cherry-picks this quote from me: "... we should have war crimes trials for these bastards -- some sort of climate Nuremberg." In context it's clear that, contrary to Jacoby's claim, I'm not talking about garden-variety global warming skeptics. There are many, many people skeptical about the reality of anthropogenic climate change. I hope to reduce that number, but the notion of doing so through prosecution rather than persuasion is as repugnant to me as to any devotee of the Bill of Rights.
The bastards in question are not everyday skeptics but a network of industry operatives, for-hire scientists, and think-tank shills paid to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) around well-established scientific facts. A core group of these people obscured the health effects of tobacco for decades -- "our product is doubt," as the infamous tobacco company memo put it -- and now they're doing the same thing on global warming. Many of the very same institutions and individuals are involved.
These folks are not "skeptical" in any epistemologically authentic way. They do not have a difference of opinion. They are not engaged in reasoned debate; they are engaged in a struggle for political and economic power. They have an agenda: to protect lumbering, fossil-fuel-intensive corporate dinosaurs.
These dinosaurs quake at the sight of smaller, faster, cleaner competitors scurrying about their feet. They fear the explosion of entrepreneurial imagination that a serious global warming campaign will unleash. So they do everything they can to delay that day of reckoning. In the process, they derogate the social institutions meant to inform and educate the public. Science. The media. Academia. The denial industry has sought to co-opt or marginalize them all.
These people do worse than suppress speech. They destroy the very preconditions of informed debate.
Contra Jacoby, I never "recanted" my comment. I merely acknowledged that the Nuremberg analogy was stupid. (A helpful tip to all you polemicists at home: leave the Nazis out of it!) Lord knows I don't want to see any state-sponsored trials. What I want is transparency -- a little sunlight cast on all the musty deceptions and backroom corporate connections.
Twenty years from now, we will look back and see that the mercenaries who lied about global warming for money, who worked single-mindedly on behalf of industry to delay action, are at least indirectly responsible for untold economic and human suffering. They are committing a moral crime and deserve our collective opprobrium.
It isn't about suppressing their speech. It's about holding them accountable for it.
Comments
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pbearden47 Posted 7:40 am
23 Oct 2006
This whole situation has been an eye-opener for me about how hate and fear spread on the internet. You, our Dave, have become a symbol of persecution of the poor conservatives who just want to spread the truth about Global Warming. I never knew you had that much power!
Aunt Phyllis
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Tom Philpott Posted 8:41 am
23 Oct 2006
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caniscandida Posted 12:03 pm
23 Oct 2006
Chickens are our cousins!
So are other sensitive animals!
Enough is enough!
No more factory farms!
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Loot Posted 2:52 pm
23 Oct 2006
These people do worse than suppress speech. They destroy the very preconditions of informed debate.
Eh, how about easing up on the hyperbole? You're blogging away, safely covered by the Bill of Rights, and still you're somehow restrained by some "preconditions?" No, the only constraint is that imposed by civil discourse, the one you want to follow, if you want to be to be taken seriously.
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willa Posted 11:25 pm
23 Oct 2006
It's very true that David enjoys the same (very considerable) freedoms as everyone else in the US.
Those freedoms just aren't as considerable as we'd like to think. We can say whatever we want, but when we're drowned out by corporations that have many orders of magnitude more resources than you and I do, I think it's still fair to say the debate is constrained.
We let corporations speak freely too, don't forget. As long as they don't tell lies for profit--well, okay, as long as they don't get caught--they can say just about anything. They have the voice of hundreds or even thousands of individuals, all saying the same thing, and I think that's an unfair precondition. Our civil rights were not intended to be given away to corporate "persons" who are able to drown out actual people. Watering down our rights does, in fact, take some of them away.
Great letter, though, David.
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KathyF Posted 2:42 am
24 Oct 2006
"They have an agenda: to protect lumbering, fossil-fuel-intensive corporate dinosaurs."
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Coby Beck Posted 8:02 am
24 Oct 2006
Invent a clever saying, and your name will live forever!
-- Anonymous
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caniscandida Posted 2:29 pm
24 Oct 2006
As a staunch dinosaurophile, I was at first suspicious that David was picking on dinosaurs.
Chickens are our cousins!
So are other sensitive animals!
Enough is enough!
No more factory farms!
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koosf Posted 9:02 am
28 Jan 2008
Not a bad word about the letter though. Well, just one thing. A reference to Nuremberg is a reference to prosecution, so maybe it would be more tactful to avoid that type of wording in the future.
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