Megan McArdle writes about the latest instance of left-wing hypocrisy:
The Department of Energy has balked at a request from the Trump transition team to provide the names of all department employees or contractors who attended UN global climate talks in the last five years. …
Watching the reaction to this from the left, I couldn’t help thinking of a famous public service advertisement from my youth, in which a father waves drug paraphernalia at his son and demands “Who taught you how to do this stuff?”
“You, all right?” screams the son. “I learned it by watching you!”
Eight months ago, state attorneys general were issuing subpoenas to the Competitive Enterprise Institute aimed at forcing the organization to cough up all communications about climate change, based on novel and changeable legal theories that boiled down to “We don’t like what you said about climate change.” How many of the people who were horrified by Trump’s actions were equally horrified by this chilling move by government authorities to abrogate the free speech rights of private actors? How many were worried about what the precedents thus set might do to the spirit of free and open inquiry? …
The differences between those subpoenas and the Trump transition’s witch hunt only blur their ultimate sameness. Each case will yield some unique fact that the proponents of government censorship can use to distinguish it from the attacks on our own side. That’s why we establish a very broad and neutral principle that you don’t go after anyone for what they believe, whether those ideas are right or wrong, whether they are held by a government employee or a corporation, and whether those who hold them are in power or out of it.
But when it comes to climate change, as with many other highly charged debates in our country, people are increasingly fond of issuing themselves special licenses to abandon those norms. Sure, in general they are in favor of free speech and open inquiry. But this issue, they say, is too important to allow the people who disagree with them to propagate their appalling misinformation.
This is, of course, exactly backward. Ideas that are unimportant, or that no one disagrees with, do not require protection from government interference. …
By all means, stand with the Department of Energy as it protects civil servants whose work displeases the incoming administration. And when the time once again comes when government tries to silence deniers of climate change, stand with those deniers as well. It’s a matter of principle, not just politics.
