In an interview, environmentalist activist and nepotite Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—the son of the man who authorized the FBI to spy on Martin Luther King—responded to a question concerning climate change skeptics by saying: “I wish there were a law you could punish them with. I don’t think there is a law that you can punish those politicians under.” Despite having a J.D., Kennedy seems to be unaware of the First Amendment. Human beings have a natural right to think and speak their opinions. Expressing skepticism concerning scientific views is protected by the First Amendment. Just as a politician or any other human being has a natural right to express skepticism concerning superstring theory in physics, so too does an individual have a natural right to express skepticism toward theories concerning climate change.
Does Kennedy believe that false
beliefs should be punished? If not, what makes climate change so special? Why
should progressives and socialists who hold clearly discredited economic
theories not also be subject to punishment? Belief in Keynesianism leads to
government policies which cause untold suffering. Why should Marxists and their
fellow travelers not be punished? Why? Because Keynesians, Marxists, and
progressives have a natural right to free speech. And so do skeptics of climate
change.
Science is not dogmatic. If
science is to become less rigorous and more akin to religion, then the entire
discipline will suffer. New discoveries and new technologies will become rare
as a result. There is simply no such thing as “settled” science. At one time it
was unthinkable that Newtonian physics would turn out not to be accurate.
However, once the ideas of quantum mechanics had been formulated and tested,
Newtonian physics became discredited. Should Einstein and other “heretics” have
been punished for their disbelief in the Newtonian orthodoxy? When Big Bang and
Steady State theorists were battling it out in the arena of scientific ideas,
should the eventual victors have been prepared to punish those whose theory
ended up being falsified?
The First Amendment has
historically vigorously defended the natural right to free speech. The defense
of unpopular and sometimes disgusting ideas is most important in protecting
freedom. There is no need to defend
ideas such as “2 + 2 = 4” or “The United States is good.” The ideas that need
protection are ideas such as those present in communism or Nazism. Or fringe
ideas such as the belief that the moon landing was a hoax. Even in an age where
political correctness is prevalent on both the Neo-Progressive Left and the
Neoconservative Right, the First Amendment remains a bastion of defense for
free speech. Unlike in much of Western Europe, the United States allows
individuals to read Mein Kampf and
even organize Neo-Nazi parties. This freedom actually serves to discredit fascistic
ideas. Instead of imbuing them with a kind of cachet through censorship and turning
them into sexy “forbidden fruit,” allowing such ideas to be fully exposed
reveals just how bad they are.
The real reason that Kennedy and
other environmentalist collectivists like him seek to censor the speech of
climate change skeptics is that they are losing the war of ideas. A June
2014 Pew Research Center poll indicated that 35% of Americans believe that the
planet is not warming and another 18% believe that the planet is warming, but
that it is due to natural causes and not to human activity. If one cannot
convince the public, why not simply silence and bully the opposition? If environmentalists
are the ones who actually love and follow science, then why are they acting so
much like superstitious medieval priests seeking to burn heretics at the stake?
The American public is simply not convinced that climate change is a serious
problem. And even if climate change is real, caution is not an irrational
strategy. After all, environmentalists not so very different from Robert F.
Kennedy, Jr. wanted to cover the Arctic ice cap with soot in the 1970s in order
to melt them as a way of preventing another ice age. If climate change does
cause major problems, it is likely more logical to deal with those problems as
they arise.
(For more about the dangerous
collectivist nature of environmentalism, read my new book The Real Culture War: Individualism vs.
Collectivism & How Bill O’Reilly Got It All Wrong. Available now on
Amazon in
both print
and Kindle.)
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