The House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Rep. Jerrold Nadler, kicked off its first impeachment circus Wednesday morning.
Noah Feldman, the first impeachment ‘witness’ the Dems rolled out on Wednesday not only called for Trump’s impeachment shortly after Trump was sworn in, he actually argued in a NY Times op-ed titled, “Why Shariah?” that Islamic Sharia law is more humane than US law.
Noah Feldman, a Harvard Law professor, bashed legal systems created by Western countries including the United States and argued Sharia law is more ‘just’ and ‘fair’ than the US Supreme Court.
Mr. Feldman actually believes that a medieval system of laws that chops off the hands of thieves, stones ‘adulterous women,’ blames the woman when she is raped by a man, publicly hangs and tosses homosexuals off of buildings, is more “progressive” and “humane” than Western laws.
“In fact, for most of its history, Islamic law offered the most liberal and humane legal principles available anywhere in the world. Today, when we invoke the harsh punishments prescribed by Shariah for a handful of offenses, we rarely acknowledge the high standards of proof necessary for their implementation,” Feldman argued.
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Feldman also claimed that the West “needs Shariah and Islam.”
“It sometimes seems as if we need Shariah as Westerners have long needed Islam: as a canvas on which to project our ideas of the horrible, and as a foil to make us look good,” he added.
Read more of Feldman’s NY Times 2008 op-ed:
FOR GENERATIONS, WESTERN STUDENTS OF THE TRADITIONAL ISLAMIC CONSTITUTION HAVE ASSUMED THAT THE SCHOLARS COULD OFFER NO MEANINGFUL CHECK ON THE RULER. AS ONE HISTORIAN HAS RECENTLY PUT IT, ALTHOUGH SHARIAH FUNCTIONED AS A CONSTITUTION, “THE CONSTITUTION WAS NOT ENFORCEABLE,” BECAUSE NEITHER SCHOLARS NOR SUBJECTS COULD “COMPEL THEIR RULER TO OBSERVE THE LAW IN THE EXERCISE OF GOVERNMENT.”
BUT ALMOST NO CONSTITUTION ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD ENABLES JUDGES OR NONGOVERNMENTAL ACTORS TO “COMPEL” THE OBEDIENCE OF AN EXECUTIVE WHO CONTROLS THE MEANS OF FORCE. THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES HAS NO ARMY BEHIND IT.
INSTITUTIONS THAT LACK THE POWER OF THE SWORD MUST USE MORE SUBTLE MEANS TO CONSTRAIN EXECUTIVES.
LIKE THE AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONAL BALANCE OF POWERS, THE TRADITIONAL ISLAMIC BALANCE WAS MAINTAINED BY WORDS AND IDEAS, AND NOT JUST BY FORCIBLE COMPULSION.
SO TODAY’S MUSLIMS ARE NOT BEING COMPLETELY FANCIFUL WHEN THEY ACT AND SPEAK AS THOUGH SHARIAH CAN STRUCTURE A CONSTITUTIONAL STATE SUBJECT TO THE RULE OF LAW. ONE BIG REASON THAT ISLAMIST POLITICAL PARTIES DO SO WELL RUNNING ON A SHARIAH PLATFORM IS THAT THEIR CONSTITUENTS RECOGNIZE THAT SHARIAH ONCE AUGURED A BALANCED STATE IN WHICH LEGAL RIGHTS WERE RESPECTED.
Feldman was widely criticized for this New York Times piece which was an excerpt from his book, “The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State” for “promoting” Sharia law.
This is who the Democrats trotted out as a legal scholar and Constitutional expert to sell the American public on impeaching President Trump. Let that sink in.
And just like that, it never actually was about climate. It’s always about changing society into a Marxist utopia and every one of these movements prove it. https://t.co/mJiqNAIOkE
This is not the first time a ‘known wolf’ has been on the radar of whichever gubbermint was involved. It makes the idea that there’s some nefarious plan afoot seem all the more plausible.
Update: According to The Telegraph, London Bridge attacker Usman Khan, 28, was a convicted terrorist who was released from prison in December 2018 – less than seven years into a 16-year sentence for a plot to bomb the London Stock Exchange.
He was also a student and personal friend of notorious Islamist hate preacher, Anjem Choudary, whose private cell phone number was stored in Khan’s phone at the time of his initial arrest.
Khan was one of a series of Al-Muhajiroun connected terrorists to be released over a six-month period beginning in the Autumn of 2018. He was known to have attended a series of Al-Muhajiroun protests and street stalls in the Midlands area prior to his arrest.
Before his conviction for the LSE terror plot, police had previously raided his home in Tunstall over concerns about his links to Choudary. –The Telegraph
Usman Khan
“All these years later, and Anjem Choudary’s one-time acolytes are still butchering members of the public on our streets,” said terrorism expert, Dr. Paul Stott.
“Usman Khan was a loyal and integral member of Choudary’s inner-circle and we know him to have been highly regarded by Choudary.”
Khan — a British citizen born in the UK and of Pakistani origin — left school with no qualifications after spending part of his late teens in Pakistan, where he lived with his mother when she became ill. On his return to the UK, he started preaching extremism on the internet and attracted a significant following.
In January 2012, Khan pleaded guilty to engaging in conduct in preparation for acts of terrorism contrary to section 5(1) of the UK’s Terrorism Act 2006. Khan was among nine men charged with conspiracy to bomb high-profile London targets in the run-up to Christmas in 2010. At the time, the men were described as an Al Qaeda-inspired group that wanted to send mail bombs to various targets and launch a “Mumbai-style” atrocity. At the time of his arrest, Khan lived in Stoke-on-Trent, a city in central England. –Dawn
Meanwhile, The Mirror reports that the tusk-wielding hero who helped stop the attack using a 5′ Narwhal Tusk he grabbed off a wall is a Polish chef named only as Lukasz, who immigrated to the UK.
So he wants people to use Nerf guns, or what?
The Bill of Rights –by its very preamble – were not a grant of rights or a listing of limitations to the people but a generic, noninclusive list of restrictions on government.
The founders were not unlearned men, and were well known as men of science and technology. Even at that time there were several “fast firing” guns that dump the notion on the trash heap of history that the smooth bore muskets of the infantry were the only thing covered by the amendment. The founders would have understood that technology would increase and improve and the 2nd amendment makes no exclusion of any modernization.
That line of thought makes 1st amendment jurisprudence only apply to hand operated printing presses and town criers on the village square.
The Supreme Court in the Heller, McDonald & Caetano decisions put this and other ideas to the test, found them wanting and discarded them.
This writer is either ignorant of U.S. Civics and the jurisprudence of the highest court in the land or he’s being disingenuous and simply trying to roll out a much overused and completely rejected line of propaganda.
The views of the rural Virginians described in the Nov. 24 front-page article “In Virginia, gun buffs plan to defy new laws” are that the gun-control proposals expected to be introduced in the 2020 Virginia legislature will “change” their way of life and that a law enforcement officer who believes a law to be unconstitutional may choose not to enforce it. Both assertions are dishonest and factually incorrect.
Assume that the expected laws would limit the number of guns sold and the capacity of magazines, and require registration and add a “red-flag” law. I know some people grow up with rifles for hunting and handguns for protection. But semiautomatic weapons are not part of that way of life. That technology did not exist when the Second Amendment was adopted; indeed, rifling in the barrels of guns to improve the distance and accuracy of a shot was not widespread. Hunting and self-defense do not require that level of lethality. As for registration, the Second Amendment begins with “a well regulated militia.” If one was to be part of a militia with a gun, the authorities needed to know who owned what guns.
Also, no law enforcement officer is given the right to determine what actions are or are not constitutional. Officers enforce the law. The lawyers for their jurisdictions may question those laws and challenge those laws in court, but they have no legal right not to enforce a law validly existing on the books.
The way-of-life argument is bogus and not supportive of the obligations we, as citizens of the commonwealth of Virginia, owe to each other.
The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which is made up of 56 nations plus the Palestinian Authority, met Thursday in Jeddah and called for the adoption of an international law criminalizing criticism of Islam. But that kind of law could never be adopted in the United States, could it? Think again.
The OIC’s secretary-general, Dr. Yousef al-Othaimeen, called upon the nations of the world, both Muslim and non-Muslim, to crack down on speech that was “insulting religions or prophets.” It was clear, however, that al-Othaimeen couldn’t have cared less about speech insulting Christianity or Judaism or Hinduism or Buddhism or any of the revered figures of those religions. He cared only about criticism of Islam.
“There are laws against anti-Semitism and racism,” said al-Othaimeen. “So we request a law against mocking religions.” He didn’t explain why laws against racism should lead to laws against criticizing belief systems, since, after all, contrary to the assumptions of Rachel Dolezal, Shaun King, and Elizabeth Warren, one cannot change one’s race, but one can change one’s beliefs, including religious beliefs. Al-Othaimeen likely knows this, but cited racism because he knows how to pull the right strings to get the Western intelligentsia to do what he wants……………
But this muzzling of criticism of Islam could never happen in America, right? Wrong. In fact, this is a lot closer to happening than most people realize. In October 2009, the Obama administration joined Egypt in supporting a resolution in the U.N.’s Human Rights Council to recognize exceptions to the freedom of speech for “any negative racial and religious stereotyping” (a highly subjective category). Approved by the U.N. Human Rights Council, the resolution called on states to condemn and criminalize “any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence.” Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton affirmed the Obama administration’s support for this on July 15, 2011, when she gave an address on the freedom of speech at an Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) conference on Combating Religious Intolerance. “Together,” she said, “we have begun to overcome the false divide that pits religious sensitivities against freedom of expression and we are pursuing a new approach. These are fundamental freedoms that belong to all people in all places and they are certainly essential to democracy.”
But how could both religious sensitivities and freedom of expression be protected?
Clinton had a First Amendment to deal with, and so in place of legal restrictions on criminalization of Islam, she suggested “old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel that they have the support to do what we abhor.” She held a lengthy closed-door meeting with OIC Secretary-General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu in December 2011 to facilitate the adoption of measures that would advance the OIC’s anti-free speech campaign. But what agreements she and Ihsanoglu made, if any, have never been disclosed. Still, the specter of an American Secretary of State conferring with a foreign official about how to restrict the freedom of speech in order to stifle communications deemed offensive to Muslims was, at the very least, chilling.
Nor was that a singular case. In July 2012, Thomas Perez — then the assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division, was asked by Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.):
Will you tell us here today that this administration’s Department of Justice will never entertain or advance a proposal that criminalizes speech against any religion?
Perez could have simply answered yes, and maybe even cited the First Amendment. Instead, Perez refused to answer the question directly. Franks persisted, ultimately asking it four times. Perez at one point responded that it was a “hard question.” He simply refused to affirm that the Obama Justice Department would not attempt to criminalize criticism of Islam.
This is today’s Democratic Party. If a Democrat wins the presidency in 2020 or thereafter, will that president advance the Left’s assault on the freedom of speech and move to implement Sharia restrictions on criticism of Islam in the United States? You can bet on it.
In that eventuality, I hope some of y’all will visit me in prison.
Giving the Attorney General – the head of the department that can arrest and charge people with committing a violation of law – the power to literally make a law (even one that deals with the dregs of society) is one of the things the founders were deathly afraid of, as the British Crown was in effect doing just that for the Colonies. Give that power to an Office the Constitution didn’t give it to and even if the current person in that Officer is a ‘good’ man, one day another man will be in that place and when he is not so good……….
A certain bit of a movie comes to mind:
The U.S. Supreme Court narrowly upheld a law in June that, in the dissenting words of Justice Neil Gorsuch, “hand[ed] off to the nation’s chief prosecutor the power to write his own criminal code.” Today, Justice Brett Kavanaugh spoke up in support of Gorsuch.
The June ruling came in Gundy v. United States, a case that centered on a 2006 federal law known as the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA). Among other things, SORNA required convicted sex offenders to register, check in periodically in person, and share personal information with the authorities.
The law also contained this provision: “The Attorney General shall have the authority to specify the applicability of the requirements of this subchapter to sex offenders convicted before the enactment of this chapter.” Translation: Congress gave the attorney general a blank check when it came to dealing with the estimated 500,000 individuals whose convictions predate SORNA’s passage.
It was that delegation of legislative authority to the executive that sparked Gorsuch’s ire. “The rule that prevents Congress from giving the executive carte blanche to write laws for sex offenders is the same rule that protects everyone else,” the justice wrote in dissent. According to Gorsuch, SORNA combined the lawmaking powers of Congress with the law enforcement powers of the executive, and then gave those combined powers to a single federal official. For the Supreme Court to let that outcome stand, Gorsuch argued, marks “the end of any meaningful enforcement of our separation of powers.”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh took no part in Gundy, leaving some court watchers to wonder about how he might have ruled. The Court’s newest justice answered that question today. In a statement respecting the denial of certiorari in Paul v. United States—another separation of powers case, which the Court turned down this morning—Kavanaugh wrote in praise of “Justice Gorsuch’s scholarly analysis of the Constitution’s nondelegation doctrine” in Gundy, noting that this “thoughtful” dissent “raised important points that may warrant further consideration in future cases.”
In other words, Kavanaugh seems to have joined Gorsuch’s campaign to put some judicial teeth into the nondelegation doctrine. That’s welcome news for those who think that the Constitution meant what it said when it placed federal lawmaking power in the hands of Congress, not in the hands of the executive branch.
Former Vice President Al Gore is back in the spotlight (sort of) and looking to capitalize on the sudden hotness of climate change with a 24-hour telethon broadcasting from Vanderbilt University called “24 Hours of Reality,” and a series of appearances on late-night television.
The original climate change activist Gore has, lately, been overshadowed by more extreme environmentalists, including adolescent “climate strike” founder Greta Thunberg and “Green New Deal” author Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) who, unlike Gore, are more interested in encouraging socialism (and, subsequently, crushing industrialization and technological advancement) as a vehicle for curbing carbon emissions.
He’s also run afoul of Thunberg and her followers — at least implicitly — for encouraging a system of climate indulgences, called “climate credits,” to offset egregious consumption rather than cutting that consumption entirely.
Gore’s landmark speech, kicking off 24 hours of activism “across the globe” had a “massive” audience of about a thousand people, according to local news in Nashville.
The woman charged, Patricia Garcia, made a false accusation that ended up with her daughter & son-in-law getting killed. I’d bet Garcia and her son-in-law had a ‘personality conflict’ and she figured she had found a way to get back at him. I wonder what she thinks now about the unintended consequences of that, if indeed she didn’t care about the possibility of getting her daughter killed during a SWAT raid out of some twisted spite filled impulse.
These cops deserve everything they’re going to get.
I’ll say again, I’m not anti-cop. I’m anti-stupid (and corrupt) cop. This crap just causes more people to conclude that the LE establishment as a whole has an endemic stupidity/corruption problem and they’re not to be trusted. That really helps with ‘community relations’ when the police deal with the real criminal element and the populace couldn’t care less.
Two former Houston police officers who allegedly provide false information that led to a deadly drugraid earlier this year have been arrested, authorities said Wednesday.
Gerald Goines and his partner, Steven Bryant, along with civilian Patricia Garcia, were taken into custody in connection with the Jan. 28 raid on a home that left two people dead and several officers wounded, the Justice Department said in a statement.
Two Former Houston Police Department Officers Indicted in Connection to Fatal Raid
Three people are now in custody in relation to the fatal raid that occurred in January 2019 on Harding Street in Houston, Texas, announced Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, U.S. Attorney Ryan K. Patrick for the Southern District of Texas and Special Agent in Charge Perrye K. Turner of the FBI.
A federal grand jury returned the nine count indictment Nov. 14 against Gerald M. Goines, 55, and Steven M. Bryant, 46, both former Houston Police Department (HPD) officers. Also charged is Patricia Ann Garcia, 53. All are residents of Houston. The indictment was unsealed this morning as authorities took all three into custody. They are expected to make their initial appearances before U.S. Magistrate Judge Dena H. Palermo at 2 p.m. central time.
The federal indictment stems from the Jan. 28 narcotics raid HPD conducted on the 7800 block of Harding Street in Houston. The enforcement action resulted in the deaths of two residents at that location.
Goines is charged with two counts of depriving the victims’ constitutional right to be secure against unreasonable searches. The indictment alleges Goines made numerous materially false statements in the state search warrant he obtained for their residence. The execution of that warrant containing these false statements resulted in the death of the two individuals as well as injuries to four other persons, according to the indictment.
Goines and Bryant are charged with obstructing justice by falsifying records. Goines allegedly made several false statements in his tactical plan and offense report prepared in connection with that search warrant. The indictment alleges Bryant falsely claimed in a supplemental case report he had previously assisted Goines in the Harding Street investigation. Bryant allegedly identified a brown powdery substance (heroin) he retrieved from Goines’ vehicle as narcotics purchased from the Harding Street residence Jan. 27.
Goines is further charged with three separate counts of obstructing an official proceeding. The federal grand jury alleges Goines falsely stated Jan. 30 that a particular confidential informant had purchased narcotics at the Harding Street location three days prior. He also falsely stated Jan. 31 that a different confidential informant purchased narcotics at that residence that day, according to the charges. On Feb. 13, he also falsely claimed he had purchased narcotics at that residence on that day. The indictment alleges none of these statements were true.
The charges against Garcia allege she conveyed false information by making several fake 911 calls. Specifically, on Jan. 8, she allegedly made several calls claiming her daughter was inside the Harding Street location. According to the indictment, Garcia added that the residents of the home were addicts and drug dealers and that they had guns – including machine guns – inside the home. The charges allege none of Garcia’s claims were true.
If convicted of the civil rights charges, Goines faces up to life in prison. Each obstruction count carries a potential 20-year sentence, while Garcia faces a five-year term of imprisonment for conveying false information.
The FBI is conducting the investigation. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Alamdar S. Hamdani, Arthur R. Jones and Sharad S. Khandelwal, and Special Litigation Counsel Jared Fishman of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, are prosecuting the case.
An indictment is a formal accusation of criminal conduct, not evidence. A defendant is presumed innocent unless convicted through due process of law.
The main point I got from the last two weeks of these shenanigans was that the bureaucraps in the state department and national security council were royally insulted that the President didn’t follow the policy decisions and talking points that they, in their vastly more experienced judgement, had devised and decided that such diminution of their political powers could not stand. Such could been taken as they weren’t necessary and their well paid and prestigious positions might be eliminated.
Previous administrations had almost always let the executive department’s employees perform the behind the scenes background work since the ‘upfront’ work of giving speeches, cabinet & committee meetings, travel junkets and signing documents is so exhausting. /sarc
Despite the establishment media’s declarations that U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland provided the smoking gun proving that President Donald Trump conditioned military aid to Ukraine on its government investigating the energy company Burisma and the 2016 election, Sondland soon told us this was merely his “presumption.”
We already knew from the transcript of the July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that aid being conditional on investigating the Bidens was a stretch, certainly nothing near the evidence that would be needed in any respectable court.
Witnesses and Democrats on Rep. Adam Schiff’s House Intelligence Committee made much of unofficial channels being used to conduct foreign policy, such as the efforts of Trump personal attorney Rudy Giuliani – hardly a surprise since these witnesses are all part of the official foreign policy bureaucracy that includes more than 77,000 employees of the State Department alone, each of whom is all too happy to justify their collective existence.
As Assistant Defense Secretary Laura Cooper said in her private deposition earlier in the month, and reiterated on Wednesday, “my sense is that all of the senior leaders of the U.S. national security departments and agencies were all unified … in their view that this assistance was essential.” Cooper added that “they were trying to find ways to engage the president on this.”
The president ultimately agreed it was essential. But why would they be trying to engage the president? Because they wanted to convince the only “official” in the executive branch who really matters, the one who – unlike them – is bestowed by the Constitution with massive power in executing the foreign policy of the United States. The one for whom they work – as advisers whose advice the president is entitled to heed or ignore, or anything in between, at will.
Those who think such near-total control is irresponsible might want to consider the observations of Edward Samuel Corwin, a famed president of the American Political Science Association brought into the Princeton University faculty in 1905 by Woodrow Wilson, and author in 1940 of “The President, Office and Powers.”
As Corwin opined: “A solitary genius who valued the opportunity for reflection above that for counsel, Lincoln came to regard Congress as a more or less necessary nuisance and the Cabinet as a usually unnecessary one.” That’s Honest Abe, not Tweeting Don.
Supreme Court: President Is ‘Sole Organ’ of Foreign Policy
Georgetown law professor for more than 50 years and ex-State Department attorney Don Wallace, Jr., in an article entitled “The President’s Exclusive Foreign Affairs Powers Over Foreign Aid,” noted GOP President Dwight Eisenhower declaring, “As president I have taken an oath to defend the Constitution. I therefore oppose any change which will impair the president’s traditional authority to conduct foreign affairs.”
He also quoted Democratic President James Buchanan’s contention “that the people have ‘rights and prerogatives’ in the president’s execution of his office which each president is under a duty to see ‘shall never be violated in his person’ and shall ‘pass on to his successors unimpaired by the adoption of a dangerous precedent.’”
Those rights and prerogatives are tremendous and unshared when it comes to conducting U.S. foreign policy, as strongly affirmed 7-to-1 by the Supreme Court in the 1936 Curtiss-Wright decision.
The court described them as “the very delicate, plenary and exclusive power of the president as the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations – a power which does not require as a basis for its exercise an act of Congress but which, of course, like every other governmental power, must be exercised in subordination to the applicable provisions of the Constitution.” (Emphasis added.)
The court’s reasoning was that, without it getting into the details, the Constitution gives the president full power to conduct foreign policy in stating at the beginning of Article II, section 2 that “The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.”
The question of whether this or that private presidential conversation – listened in on at remote locations by a veritable army of bureaucrats – contains untoward assertions or requests is secondary to another question: How can any president possibly act effectively as “the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations” not requiring “as a basis for its exercise an act of Congress” if those listening can run to a politically hostile Congress with their accusations of impropriety?
When these presidential powers, and the obvious threat to them, are understood, the weakness of basing any case for the impeachment of Trump on what was just served up by Sondland and other presidential servants before Schiff’s committee becomes clear.
Global Warming’s Apocalyptic Path It comes in waves, and it’s impossible to predict what will happen after the current wave of increasingly unhinged climate change activism breaks.
Unfortunately, like most apocalyptic cults, when prophecy fails, it’s not that the prophet was wrong, it’s the ‘numbers’ were added up incorrectly.
Global warming has been characterized by its critics (and occasionally by followers like Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono) as a religious movement. While this is correct, it is a religious movement of a special kind, that is, an apocalyptic movement. And although it is widely known that apocalyptic movements foretell an end of days, demand huge sacrifices by followers, and demonize dissent, what is less known is that these movements follow predictable patterns. The general “laws” that an apocalyptic movement follows over time explain both its short-term strength and, fortunately, its longer-term vulnerability.
In Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience (2011), Richard Landes chronicles recurring apocalyptic eruptions over the last 3,000 years. Typically there is belief in an imminent cataclysmic destruction that can only be averted by a total transformation of society. Precisely because the stakes are so high, a successful apocalyptic movement has extraordinary initial power. Believers are committed, zealous, and passionate, the urgent need for prompt action putting them at a high pitch of emotional intensity.
Landes describes the four-part life cycle of such movements. First comes the waxing wave, as those whom Landes calls the “roosters” (they crow the exciting new message) gain adherents and spread their stirring news. Second is the breaking wave, when the message reaches its peak of power, provokes the greatest turmoil, and roosters briefly dominate public life. Third is the churning wave, when roosters have lost a major element of their credibility, must confront the failure of their expectations, and mutate to survive. Last is the receding wave, as the “owls” — those who have all along warned against the roosters’ prophecies — regain ascendancy.
While Landes does not apply his apocalyptic model to global warming, the fit is obvious. In the 1980s and ’90s, a series of UN conferences on climate launched the waxing wave. This was followed at the beginning of this century by the breaking wave. In 2006, Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth (which later became a classroom staple) persuaded a broad public that man-made global warming threatened doomsday. That same year Sir Nicholas Stern, appointed by Prime Minister Tony Blair to lead a team of economists to study climate change, prophesied it would bring “extended world war” and the need to move “hundreds of millions, probably billions of people.” In 2009, then–UN Secretary Ban Ki-moon told the Global Economic Forum, “We have just four months. Four months to secure the future of our planet.”
Remarkably, in November of that same year, 2009, at the height of its urgency, the global warming apocalypse suddenly fell into the churning wave phase. Someone hacked into the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in England and downloaded emails exchanged among the top scientific climate roosters. The messages bemoan recalcitrant data that fail to support the claim of “unprecedented warming,” describe the tricks (their term) used to coax the data to buttress the theory, report efforts to keep the views of scientific dissenters out of reputable journals and UN reports, and boast of deletion of data to make it unavailable to other researchers. Given that public belief in the global warming apocalypse depended upon its supposed rock-solid scientific foundation, the scandal, dubbed “Climategate,” was devastating. Beleaguered owls, especially at the Heartland Institute, ground zero of what the mainstream media dismissed as “science deniers,” had high expectations that the credibility of the apocalypse had suffered a fatal blow.
It didn’t. One can only speculate as to the reasons. One major factor may be that political elites had become too committed to go back. Landes writes that elites are typically a hard sell, especially in the case of prophecies demanding a society self-mutilate. In this case they were won over with astonishing ease. Only a month after Climategate, in December 2009, England passed the Climate Change Act, in the works for several years, that mandated an 80-percent cut in six greenhouse gases by 2050 (relative to 1990 emissions). Journalist James Delingpole, a long-time owl, has called it “the most stupid, pointless and wasteful piece of legislation ever passed in British parliamentary history,” with the costs likely to exceed a trillion pounds. It is a mark of the inroads the apocalypse had made in the political class that there were only five dissenting votes out of the nearly 650 cast. Not to be outdone, Germany’s politicians in 2010 passed the Energiewende, a program that looked forward to cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 80 to 95 percent by 2050.
Whatever the reasons, the churning wave turned out to be a mini-wave. For a few years polls showed greater public skepticism, with the issue ranking low compared to others. But this July, a BBC program called ‘Climategate’: 10 years on, what’s changed? found Climategate (the charges of scientific misbehavior come off in the program as “a smear”) might as well not have happened. Since then, the BBC reports, the public has reengaged, former skeptics have changed their minds, politicians are increasingly concerned, and children are speaking out “authentically.”
Rather than completing the normal cycle by going into a receding wave, the climate apocalypse has come roaring back as a breaking wave, this time with children in the forefront. (The classroom indoctrination of the previous decade paid off.) Led by a 15-year-old (now 16) in pigtails, Greta Thunberg, beginning in March millions of children in over 120 countries skipped school to embark on a series of “climate strikes.” At the March UN climate summit, Thunberg announced, “We are at the beginning of a mass extinction.” Berating the respectful audience of world leaders for having “stolen my dreams and my childhood,” she produced her electrifying (to her followers), “How dare you?”
“Time has almost entirely run out,” say the activists of Extinction Rebellion, a civil disobedience movement launched in England in October 2018 (it expanded to the U.S. this January). Its red-robed adherents have shut down traffic from London to Australia to Washington, D.C. ER, as it is called, demands that governments declare “a disaster and ecological emergency” and reduce carbon emissions to net zero by 2025. As a think tank sympathetic to the group has pointed out, this requires an end to air travel and taking 38 million cars off the road.
Nonetheless, this second breaking wave is also doomed to give way to churning and eventually receding waves. What eventually dooms apocalyptic prophecies is their failure to materialize. In the case of global warming, true believers are in a bind. The public is likely to accept a major reduction in its standard of living only if it believes “mass extinction” is the alternative. Yet the closer and more threatening the scenarios, the more they are subject to disproof. Believers may postpone the apocalyptic date, but eventually cognitive dissonance becomes too great.
