10.24.12
On the yen for authoritarians (continued)
Frontline’s special on how a few groups in the far right Republican Party made the fact of global warming a no-go in the United States is here.
This has made the country into a redoubt of know-nothing-ism and anti-science.
“They think of themselves as rebels,” Frontline’s John Hockenberry says at the start.
Rebels — a bunch of overweight white men with no scientific credentials and a few run-out-of-town ex-scientist pariahs in the Republican Party. But how they know how to work closed media.
Scientists go on to explain how these groups — specifically entities like the Heartland and Cato Institute’s purposely misread the data and harass those publishing on the science with FOIA requests for their e-mail in fishing expeditions in hopes that handfuls of messages, presented out of context, can be used to damage reputations.
From yesterday, William L. Shirer — in 1959 — on the results of totalitarians:
It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was to try to even make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were.
Make no mistake, a great deal of responsibility lies with the supine Democratic Party, too. John Kerry explains it vacated the issue because of attacks from the right.
Bob Inglis, a Republican who was primaried out of office from the right, believed human causation of climate change. And he relates how he was taken down by Tea Party attacks and talk radio, lumped in with the scientists assumed to be “godless liberals.”
“Tennessee passed a law to allowing the views of climate change skeptics to be taught in schools,” informs Frontline.
For half the country, science has been turned into a dungeon by the Republican Party.
“The [Heartland Institute’s climate change denial] campaign of alternative scientific studies, opinion pieces, books, and charts has been been building for years,” informs Frontline. It was bankrolled by big oil.
“Advocacy groups were enlisted to confuse the issue,” it continues.
“Exxon’s millions for skeptic’s groups made it a public target which would eventually be a problem for a publicly-traded company,” says Hockenberry.
“New leadership” at Exxon decided to review its anti-science strategy in 2006. Funding for its anti-science initiatives was suspended.
However, the damage had been done. Other deep pockets, like the Koch brothers, have stepped in to continue the financing of global warming denial. Even more money has been funneled through anonymous funding in the guise of a black hole agency located in Alexandria, Virginia, called Donors Trust.
“The [climate] scientists pushing this have a Marxist agenda,” says one of the climate denial quacks, a man funded by unknown business tycoons, right at the end.